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World Gliding Championships
The World Gliding Championships (WGC) is a gliding competition held every two years or so by the FAI Gliding Commission. The dates are not always exactly two years apart, often because the contests are sometimes held in the summer in the Southern Hemisphere. History Gliding had been a demonstration sport at the 1936 Summer Olympics and was due to become an official Olympic sport in the Helsinki Games in 1940. However, since the Second World War, gliding has not featured in the Olympics, and so the World Championships are the highest level in the sport. There are now contests for six classes of glider and so in recent years the Championships have been divided between two locations. The women's, junior, grand prix and aerobatic events are also held separately. Each of the following entries give the year and location of the contest followed by the winner of each class, nationality and the glider used. A list of future events is available here World Grand Prix Gliding Champi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gliding Competitions
Some of the pilots in the sport of gliding take part in gliding competitions. These are usually racing competitions, but there are also aerobatic contests and on-line league tables. History of competitions In the early days, the main goal was to stay airborne for as long as possible. However, flights could last for days and some pilots killed themselves by falling asleep. This type of duration contest was abandoned by 1939. From the earliest days of gliding there was also 'free distance' flying. Pilots launched themselves from a hill top, attempting to glide as far as possible. Once pilots learned to exploit ridge lift and thermals, flights could be extended further. Eventually they mastered flying from thermal to thermal, resulting in ever longer retrieves. As the pilots and gliders became better, the winner of a competition day might fly so far that they could not get back to the competition site for the next day. Turn-points were therefore used. Those pilots who ma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
DFS Weihe
The DFS Weihe (English: ''Harrier'') is a German single-seat, high-wing, 18 metre wingspan, high-performance glider that was designed by Hans Jacobs in 1937-38. Design and development Jacobs designed the Weihe to be the pre-eminent performance glider of its era and indeed it captured many championships and set many records, until its performance was surpassed at the end of the 1950s. Even today it is considered one of the "classic sailplane designs". The Weihe is of wooden construction with fabric covering on the wing trailing edges and the control surfaces. The spar is built from Baltic Pine, with a birch leading edge D-box, fuselage and the fixed portions of the tail surfaces. The airfoil is a modified Gö 549-M.2 section. Early versions took off from a dolly and landed on a fixed skid, while later versions has a fixed wheel and skid undercarriage. Originally fitted with DFS-style airbrakes, some were later modified for Schempp-Hirth style brakes instead. The aircraft incor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Slingsby Eagle
The Slingsby Type 42 Eagle was a two-seat glider designed in England from 1952. Development After the end of WWII the British Gliding Association (BGA) recognised a need for two-seat training gliders to replace the unsafe and inefficient solo training techniques that were prevalent at the time, launching a competition to design a two-seat trainer. Though Slingsby did not enter the competition it spurred them to look in the early 1950s at a two-seat version of their Type 34 Sky. The advent of the NACA laminar flow aerofoil sections at that time prompted them to start from scratch, designing a large aircraft with nearly 18 m span, three-part wings and a large fuselage with spacious, comfortable cockpits. The fuselage is built up as a wooden truss with a plywood-covered stressed-skin top decking and wooden semi-monocoque forward fuselage. The cockpits are covered by two canopies, the forward one hinging to starboard and the rear hinged at the rear forming part of the leading ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nicholas Goodhart
Rear Admiral Hilary Charles Nicholas Goodhart CB FRAeS (28 September 1919 – 9 April 2011) was an engineer and aviator who invented the mirror-sight deck landing system for aircraft carriers. He was also a world champion and record breaker in gliding. Early life Goodhart was born at Inkpen, Berkshire, the son of a patent engineer. He was educated at Miss White's Kintbury, and Connaught House Weymouth. Early career Goodhart entered the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth in the Hawke Term in 1933. He then attended the Royal Naval Engineering College at Keyham, Devonport. He served as an engineering lieutenant, and saw action in the evacuation of Crete in 1941 on which was hit by two bombs. He then served on and saw more action escorting convoys to Malta and the assaults on Italy over the next two years. He undertook pilot training in Canada in 1944 and joined the Fleet Air Arm. While flying in a Grumman Hellcat with 896 Naval Air Squadron from the carrier off the c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Paul MacCready
Paul B. MacCready Jr. (September 25, 1925 – August 28, 2007) was an American aeronautical engineer. He was the founder of AeroVironment and the designer of the human-powered aircraft that won the first Kremer prize. He devoted his life to developing more efficient transportation vehicles that could "do more with less". Early life and education Born in New Haven, Connecticut to a medical family, MacCready was an inventor from an early age and won a national contest building a model flying machine at the age of 15. "I was always the smallest kid in the class ... by a good bit, and was not especially coordinated, and certainly not the athlete type, who enjoyed running around outside, and was socially kind of immature, not the comfortable leader, teenager type. And so, when I began getting into model airplanes, and getting into contests and creating new things, I probably got more psychological benefit from that than I would have from some of the other typical school things." Ma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Saint-Yan
Saint-Yan is a commune in the Saône-et-Loire department in the region of Bourgogne-Franche-Comté in eastern France. Geography The Arconce forms part of the commune's southern border and the Loire part of its western border. Climate Education A campus of the École nationale de l'aviation civile (French civil aviation university) is located in Saint-Yan. See also *Communes of the Saône-et-Loire department The following is a list of the 565 communes of the Saône-et-Loire department of France. The communes cooperate in the following intercommunalities (as of 2020):Communes of Saône-et-Loire {{SaôneLoire-geo-stub ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ikarus Košava
The Ikarus Košava ( en, North Wind) is a two-seat sailplane designed and built in Yugoslavia in the early 1950s. It won the 1954 World Gliding Championships in the two seat category and came second in the same event two years later. Design and development The Košava was commissioned by the Yugoslavian Aeronautical Union and built at the Ikarus factory to replace the pre-World War II Kranich II aircraft. It is a wooden glider, covered in a mixture of plywood and fabric. The wings are built up around single spars, with ply covering to the leading edge forming a D- or torsion box. Behind the spar the covering is fabric. Forward sweep of 4.5° at one quarter chord allows the centre of gravity to be far enough forward to place the rear of the two tandem seats at it and the leading edge. The wing is of gull wing design, the roots at the shoulder wing position and with 7° of dihedral on the inboard 40% of span. A subsidiary spar carries plain flaps inboard, mass balanced and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Breguet 901
Breguet or Bréguet may refer to: * Breguet (watch), watch manufacturer **Abraham-Louis Breguet (1747–1823), Swiss watchmaker **Louis-François-Clement Breguet (1804–1883), French physicist, watchmaker, electrical and telegraph work * Bréguet Aviation, a defunct French aircraft manufacturer **Louis Charles Bréguet (1880–1955), French airplane designer * Breguet School, now known as École supérieure d'ingénieurs en électronique et électrotechnique ESIEE (previously named ''École Supérieure d'Ingénieurs en Électrotechnique et Électronique'') is a network of French graduate schools ("French Grande Ecole") composed of two graduate schools of engineering known as ESIEE Paris, ESIEE Amiens, ... (ESIEE) {{disambiguation ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Great Hucklow
Great Hucklow ( Old English ''Hucca's burial mound'') is a small village and civil parish in the Derbyshire Peak District which nestles under Hucklow Edge between the villages of Tideswell and Bradwell. It has a population of about 100, including Foolow , Grindlow plus Little Hucklow and being measured at 427 in the 2011 Census. In the village, there is a thriving primary school, which is located up a short lane (School Lane), under the edge, and a pub, the Queen Anne. It had a theatre for 40 years, which was run by L. du Garde Peach and the actors and staff were from the local area. The first production (The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare) was in 1927 staged in the Hucklow Holiday Homes. The first set of plays in the New Play House was in 1938, with four one act plays written by Peach. The New Play House was in a converted lead mining building (known locally as cupolas from the lead smelting furnace). The first 200-second hand seats cost 1 shilling and 9 pence each. The st ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
DFS Kranich
The DFS Kranich is a type of German glider. It was developed by Hans Jacobs for the Deutsche Forschungsanstalt für Segelflug (DFS). History Series production of the Kranich (Crane) took place in the aircraft division of Karl Schweyer AG in Mannheim. The two-seater was, in its version 2, the most widely built two-seat glider in Germany from 1935 to 1939. Several hundred examples were built; exact numbers are not known. On 11 October 1940 Erich Klöckner in a Kranich achieved the record height in a glider of 11,460 m (37598 ft). Because it occurred in wartime, the altitude record was not recognized by the Allied occupying powers, and Klöckner only received official recognition by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI) in the late 1990s.aerokurier magazine 1/1999: Erich Klöckners Vorstoß zur Tropopause, Motor Presse 1999 This record height was only exceeded ten years after the flight by the American Bill Ivans during a similar scientific program in the Sierra Ne ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hanna Reitsch
Hanna Reitsch (29 March 1912 – 24 August 1979) was a German aviator and test pilot. Along with Melitta von Stauffenberg, she flight tested many of Germany's new aircraft during World War II and received many honors. Reitsch was among the very last people to meet Adolf Hitler alive in the in late April 1945. Reitsch set more than 40 flight altitude records and women's endurance records in gliding and unpowered flight, before and after World War II. In the 1960s, she was sponsored by the West German foreign office as a technical adviser in Ghana and elsewhere, and founded a gliding school in Ghana, where she worked for Kwame Nkrumah. Early life and education Reitsch was born in Hirschberg, Silesia, on 29 March 1912 to an upper-middle-class family. She was daughter of Dr. Wilhelm (Willy) Reitsch, who was an ophthalmology clinic manager, and his wife Emy Helff-Hibler von Alpenheim, who was a member of the Austrian nobility. Despite her mother being a devout Cat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Slingsby Sky
The Slingsby Type 34 Sky is a high performance single seat competition sailplane built in the United Kingdom. It was successful in major events, particularly in the World Gliding Championships of 1952. Design and development The single seat Slingsby Sky resulted from Slingsby's experience at the 1948 International Gliding Contests, where they flew their 15 m span Gull IV. This convinced them that to be competitive against aircraft like the German DFS Weihe, the Gull's successor would need a span of 18 m or more. Consequently, the Sky was aerodynamically identical to the Gull IV apart from span (and hence aspect ratio) and length, though it differed in construction. It dominated the 1952 Contests and was well placed in both 1954 and 1956. The Sky is a wooden aircraft, using the traditional spruce for stressed members and birch ply elsewhere. Its wing has a constant chord inner section over the first 30% of span, then tapers on both edges to a rounded tip. The 20% increas ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
