Where Have All the Glider Kits Gone?
Filling the yawning gap between your first kits and the carbon fiber of your dreams.
This story originally appeared in the much-missed in-house publication of Dodgson Designs Second Wind, Number 94–2 in 1994. Therein, it appeared under the title The Plight of the Homeless. We think Bob’s article is still every bit as relevant today as it was back then— Ed.
I have watched the glider kit industry slowly polarize over the last few years into the two extreme ends of the cost and philosophical spectrums — leaving a barren wasteland as the home of the middle ground in soaring. In the 1970s and 1980s, you had a good choice of beginner kits, intermediate kits and high-end kits. There were cost effective progressions as one’s building and flying skills increased — allowing the soaring enthusiast to proceed comfortably to whatever level he desired.
Many flyers opted not to progress to multichannel performance. Our kits were the top of the high-end and the only multichannel kits available through the 1970s and most of the 1980s. The point is that there was a wide choice of affordable options between the beginner kits and the top-end kits. There was an affordable and comfortable home for any glider flyer, at any level of expertise and desire. Now, it appears that there are the inexpensive beginner’s kits at one end of the market and then there are the pricey “mortgage-busting” prefabricated clone gliders at the other end with little in between — leaving those who want to progress in an economical manner pretty much on their own.
This problem is becoming more pronounced as fewer soaring pilots are taking the time to learn the basic building skills. Meanwhile, the once rich pool of quality builder-kits is fast drying up; leaving a void between the entry-level beginner kits and the prefab clones. Just how many above-entry-level builder-kits do you think are currently on the market that can be built without vacuum bagging and other exotic equipment? How many moderately priced kits are capable of serious contest performance? You are hard pressed to find any! Needless to say, it is this neglected affordable, performance, builder-kit, market for which our Anthem, Saber, V-gilante, Wee-gilante and Pivot are the answer. I fear that the profusion of costly prefab clone looking gliders are serving an ever diminishing pool of flyers. How many crashes of these costly, hard-to-repair gliders can most flyers survive before they decide that the rewards of the hobby are no longer worth the financial toll on domestic bliss?
In the past, a hobbyist would buy a kit at a do-able cost and then invest 40 or more hours of his own skilled building time to construct his glider. If disaster struck and a serious crash occurred, the builder could usually repair the damaged ship. Even if the glider was totally destroyed, the major investment was the personal time of the flyer. The crash did not cause a financial tsunami that could wipe out the financial viability of the entire family. As discouraging as it was to see the results of your effort wiped out, you always knew that you could afford to buy another kit and that you could do an even better building job the next time! You were not unceremoniously drummed out of the hobby by cataclysmic financial loss, as if you were a highrolling Las Vegas gambler whose luck had run out!
The result of this lack of viable economical performance kits is that fewer people are staying in the hobby very long. So we have more and more expensive prefab kits fighting over an ever dwindling market —a market that is not being refueled by new flyers moving up through cost effective performance kits. Happily, the V-gilante and the Wee- gilante seem to have hit the bull's eye in the heart of that forgotten market! Sure, there is still a significant market for the trendy, expensive, ‘bullshitically correct’, prebuilt clone gliders. They allow anybody with the bucks to buy their way into a competitive performing ship. Interestingly, these clone gliders, with all of their appeal, have robbed some of the magic from the sport of soaring. This is partially because wittingly or unwittingly, the clone gliders appear to have been optimized for maximum towing performance rather than for maximum thermaling and soaring performance.
True, in contest work tow height is important, but it is not everything and it is not what soaring is really about as many contest flyers are discovering. In parts of the country where short contest flights are the norm and landings are the measure of the man, the slender, smallish, high zooming gliders work fine. In parts of the country where the premium is on soaring and the tasks are longer, the light lift performance and long distance visibility become of utmost importance. The smallish, pencil fuselaged, clone gliders with their compromised sinking speeds, become noncompetitive.
Ironically, by present cost standards, our (Dodgson Designs) once ‘expensive’ kits are now ‘moderately priced’ and offer the builder a significant option. They offer him the best thermal performance that money can buy at a price that intermediate flyers can comfortably afford. And, sadly, our kits are about the only high-performance quality ‘builder-kits’ presently available to the glider flyer. Unlike the costly clone gliders of today, all of our gliders are optimized for soaring performance rather than being optimized for winch performance. They are designed to milk the weakest subtleties out of marginal lift. Their scale-like fuselages are designed for maximum visibility so that they can be easily seen and successfully flown higher and further away than other gliders in their respective classes.
Visibility is both a safety factor and a very real competition advantage. All of our kits are good on a winch yet they are also able to launch well off a hi-start — even a short hi-start! Unlike most other high performance gliders, our kits can be slowed down ‘almost to a walk’, for gentle landings and practical, accessible, small field flying! Now, there is a clear choice for money-conscious flyers who want to move up to a quality kit and who want top competition performance on the weekends and yet who want to have fun sport flying off a hi-start the rest of the time.
For many of us, building is part of the soaring growth and discovery experience and being free from a bulky, cumbersome winch is a liberating experience in itself. Why do you think that hand-launch has become so popular in recent years? As the hobby becomes too complex, the true soaring soul inside us all cries for the simple joy of riding thermals as efficiently as possible with a minimum of incumbrances. The antitheses of this ‘less is more’ philosophy was overheard by me this summer at the local flying field. Several of us were up flying in marginal thermal lift. I use a short high- start with my V-gilante to get about a hundred foot launch. By arduously working tiny bubbles, I and others were getting long, satisfying, flights with altitude to burn on occasion. A flyer, with the latest hi-torque winch, the latest clone pencil profile glider saw that the lift was momentarily good. He shot his winged arrow up on his super winch for a seven hundred foot tow and headed straight for the nearby ridge that most of us had been avoiding as a ‘give me’.
With the wind blowing up the ridge, this hi-tech pilot had no trouble staying in the air. However, in about five minutes he was seen doing a thrilling hi-speed pass across the field and he landed. Someone said to him "Are you down already? I thought you were in good lift a few minutes ago!" The high-winching pilot replied "Oh, I was in lift all right but to me the real fun in soaring is launching and landing!" I must say that this is a different perspective on soaring than I have ever had.
The significance of this new revelation finally hit me! I had been designing gliders that would stay in the air the longest possible time under the most diverse range of conditions. Instead, I should have been designing them for the biggest thrill during winch launching and frequent landings! At any rate, I am proud that the homeless souls who want high performance gliding on a limited budget and who are willing to invest a little quality building time to achieve that goal still have a home at Dodgson Designs!
©1994 Bob Dodgson
Read the collected works of Bob Dodgson in the New RCSD: see The Dodgson Anthology. Also, are you a fan of the retro Dodgson Designs logo? Otherwise, now read the next article in this issue, return to the previous article in this issue or go to the table of contents. A PDF version of this article, or the entire issue, is available upon request.
