Schweizer SGS 1-35 - Background

Background

By the early 1970s competition in the open, standard and 15 meter classes was dominated by fiberglass sailplanes. Schweizer Aircraft evaluated the use of fiberglass for sailplane construction but rejected it for several reasons:

  • The high cost of demonstrating to the Federal Aviation Administration that this new material could safely be used for aircraft primary structure.
  • Problems with crash resistance of fiberglass structures in high impact accidents.
  • The unknown service life of fiberglass.
  • The high degree of manual labor required to do fiberglass lay-ups at that time and the associated cost.

The company believed that it could get equivalent performance to fiberglass from the material that it knew best, aluminum. Experiments with the laminar flow wing Schweizer SGS 1-29 in the late 1950s had shown that there was laminar flow potential in metal wings.

One of factors that convinced the company that there was a market for a US-made competition sailplane was the great loss of value of the United States Dollar in the early 1970s which had made European sailplanes prohibitively expensive to US buyers.

Read more about this topic:  Schweizer SGS 1-35

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