Archaeopteryx News from Germany and Australia

If you’ve not seen or heard about this remarkable foot-launched ultralight glider, then watch this video. The Archaeopteryx was designed by Roger Ruppert  of Ruppert Composite. — The Editors

Klaus Burkhard, originator and editor of UL-Segelflug.de, recently published a story on his site about pilots flying an Archaeopteryx, who zoomed to the top of the OLC-PHG rankings in March.

While in the northern hemisphere the 2014 soaring season has not even started, Marlies & Peter Eicher at Downunder made the leap to 1th & 2nd place at the OLC WorldRanking-List of the PHG-group. With six respectable FAI-Triangles, Marlies leads the ranking-list at present by a total of 2.570,44 points and a total distance of 1.606,52 km, flown in Archaeopteryx.

On April 6th, just as this story goes to press, we learned that Peter Eicher just fought himself back into second place on the OLC-List, with a wounderful FAI-Triangle.

Read the rest of Klaus’ blog here—and watch for follow-up news about Marlies and Peter.

Klaus informs us that the Archaeopteryx can now be self-launched by motor from level terrain.

The new E-Powerpack for swiss-made  Archaeopteryx is now ready to be sold.

The powerful package can be installed or dismantled within only five minutes.
Take-off roll is 50 m on hard-covered runways. A climb rate of 2.5 m/s and a
climb-speed of 75 km/h brings the “Elec´teryx up to an height of 1,300 m AGL in nine minutes.With the new E-Drive, the Archaeopteryx can now be self-launched in the flats.
The new E-Drive can be seen and ordered at AERO 2014, starting April 9th
in Friedrichshafen, Germany.

And in another development…

SoaringNZ, the official Soaring-Magazine of Gliding New Zealand Incorporated, just published a four-page article in [the February-March] issue, about the Ultralight-Soaring scene Made in Germany. In a quarterly issue, SoaringNZ publishes all sorts of interesting soaring-subjects not only of New Zealand, but around the whole world.

Klaus goes on to say…

In the February-issue of SoaringNZ, Jill published a four-page article entitled The fascination of ULTRALIGHT SOARING, where readers are introduced to Ultralight-Soaring made in Germany. As usual, this new article is also available as free download at our website under Presse/Publikationen.

For the rest of the story, click here to read Klaus’ blog.