Gena Tabery, On the Fly: Days 10-11

For Open Class winner Oscar Goudrian (OG) of South Africa, Day 10 turned out to be the slowest winning day of this race, at 134.5 kph, or 83.6 mph. The fastest speed of the day went to Australia’s 18-meter pilot, David Jansen (4D), at 141.2 kph, or 87.7 mph.

As for Day 11, another day, another polygonal task. Task-calling at this contest has featured large numbers of turnpoints, short legs, and acute angles. The contest area is somewhat limited Monday through Friday by restricted military space immediately west of Uvalde. And indeed, one pilot violated that space yesterday and received a severe penalty. Yet geography and weather alone cannot account for these somewhat unusual, pinball-like tasks.

This contest also features an unusually high number of new ships in the Open Class, all with exceptionally high wing-loading. At 28 meters tip to tip, Dick Butler’s one-of-a-kind Concordia is the longest of the new planes (at 28.5 meter’s, Ron Tabery’s modified ASW-SS has the longest wings of any plane here). But while the other new planes feature the same high wing loading, they differ in having gone to shorter wings. In fact, the peak of super-long wings may have been reached by the ETA, which flew at the 2003 Lezno, Poland WGC, with a wingspan of 30.9 meters. Tilo Holighaus of Schempp-Hirth notes, “This is the first time for decades that something smaller should be better.”

The Quintus M and the Antares 23-E, 23-meter gliders, developed in a joint venture between Lange Aviation and Schempp-Hirth, both feature slim wings with high aspect ratio, designed to perform their best at high speeds. Although the Quintus has been in the works for several years, Holighaus says once it was clear that Uvalde would be the site of the next WGC, Schempp-Hirth “concentrated energy” to get the plane ready in time. Holighaus freely admits to having brought seven “prototypes” to Uvalde, each ready just in time for shipping.

Like the Antares, the Jonkers brothers’ JS-1 series planes are a logical extension into the Open Class market. With its 21-meter tips, it is the smallest of the new planes. All of the new planes continue a fifty-year plus evolution toward higher wing loading. Market desire for smaller gliders, higher wing loading, and anticipation of Uvalde’s famously fast skies seem to have brought four new sailplanes to this WGC, three with significantly shorter wings. All are doing well in Texas; it will be interesting to watch the smaller planes in the slightly less ideal skies of Europe. Says engineer Christian Streifeneder, “It is a gamble.”

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