Time for Separate 18m Records?

On Tuesday, April 21, 2020 at 5:46:47 PM UTC-7, Roy B. wrote:

The difference arises when you are far from home and faced with a decision that might put you on the
ground. The fellow with the motor has a tool that makes that decision much less consequential. This is
why I believe that the records should be different categories.

So I flew a ASW-20B for about 15 years, then upgraded to ASH-26E in 2001. Flew each for about 1500 hours and many long flights with a number of records in each. A few years ago I traded the ASH-26E for a ASW-27b. Essentially the same glider performance-wise.

My wife and I work full time, but she retired near the time I switched gliders. As a nurse, she couldn't take a Monday off due to a long retrieve on Sunday. Before 2001, we did have a few late retrieves and got home just in time to take a shower and go to work after an all night drive. Ugh!

I compare the ASH-26E to a 1-26 (in which I even did diamond goal). In the 1-26, the crew is generally a few minutes away after landing out. A bad day is when the glider landed on one side of an obstacle and access requires driving several hours to get to the field that was only a mile away. in the motorglider, a bad day is the engine failing to start, landing in a nice field, and waiting hours for the crew to arrive. A good day is the crew catching the wing on landing the 1-26 -or- the engine starts and I can motor home, or climb back into the good air.

Best I can tell, I've taken the same "risks" the last few years without the motor as I did when I had the '26E. I almost never needed the engine to get home, and now I still almost never land out. The difference is that now I know we can just take our time with the retrieve and I can always take Monday off, or just go in to work late. I've had to relight a couple times, and have landed a few miles outbound. Those would have been fixed by a motor.

What if I could fly the way we did at the Hilton Ranch? Fly hard and after a land out, just wait for the helicopter to come get me. Then a crew will get the the glider and have it ready to fly the next morning. OK, so the one time I landed out, they sent a towplane :-)

You can buy a lot of aero retrieves for the cost of a motor. Or a decent motorhome to spend the night in at the landout location. :-)

So yeah, a motorglider provides a lot of convenience. But a lot of $$, a full time crew, and spare time does too.

5Z