Sailplanes

This book, Volume 1 of a projected series, describes and illustrates more than 120 types of sailplane, designed, built and flown in many countries during the quarter century following the first organised gliding competition on the Wasserkuppe in 1920. The astonishing achievements of designers and builders, lacking modern materials and production methods, and the flights made by the pilots of those times, deserve to be recorded and remembered. New scale drawings, produced in digital form, show structural details with colour shading to indicate the materials used. Exact dimensions, cross sections and profiles are included. There are more than 300 authentic photographs, many previously unpublished. The textual commentary draws attention to significant trends and developments in sailplane design. This book will prove a rich source of accurate information for scale modellers, who were much in mind when making the drawings and selecting photographs. To fly most of the sailplanes described here, the only way now is to build a large scale radio controlled model.