The Development, Design and Construction of Gliders and Sailplanes

Extract

The Gliding and Soaring Flight movement is as old as History. The observation of bird flight must have shown the men of former centuries in the same way as our own generation, that apart from power flight with wing beats there must be another flight possibility, enabling the use of the energy in the movement of air masses for flight without the expenditure of other power. The experiments undertaken in these times on the solution of the flight problem have come down to us only through myths and sagas, and we cannot differentiate between truth and imagination in these stories.

Experimental research, which can certainly be considered as the foundation of modern physics, has also in the realm of aerodynamics laid the basis for modernaeronautics. In this gliding and soaring flight plays the rôle of full–scale experiments, not as an end in itself, but as a proving-ground and last station before the invention of power flight.