Talk:List of gliders/Archive 1

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Is TeST a serious builder, or is it a test entry?

In the list for Alexander Schleicher, there seem to be a number of bugus entries that don't belong in the list.

Yes, TesT manufactures a light motorglider.Francisco de Almeida 19:27, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

Schleicher started his business by building small numbers of gliders designed by himself or (more often) by others, early in the twentieth century. This may explain those apparently spurious entries. The list comes from the German wiki.Francisco de Almeida 19:37, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

User DHaluza has requested that the issue of rocket powered gliders be discussed in the Talk page. Well, rocket powered gliders have a long and distinguished history. As far as I recall, Alexander Lippisch and others were already experimenting with man carrying gliders powered by rockets in 1928 (e.g. the 'Ente'), in research that would many years later be militarised and lead to the Me 163 rocket interceptor. Opel and Valier, Julius Hatry, and Ettore Cattaneo all built rocket-launched gliders before the end of the twenties. Since then, many other instances of gliders with rockets or turbines for self-launching have occured.

There is no contradiction in a powered glider. In fact, nowadays up to 70% of all gliders built leave the factory already with some auxiliary means of propulsion installed. Some of these gliders easily exceed the climb performance of lower-powered general aviation airplanes. Nevertheless, they are unmistakably gliders, just as much as a sailing boat with an auxiliary engine is still a sailing boat, conceived and optimised for cruising under sail.

The X-15, as well as other projects influenced by it such as the stillborn Dynasoar and the present-day shuttles, were designed to re-enter the atmosphere and land as pure gliders. It is noteworthy that the concept was developed in a research environment where test-pilots were routinely exposed to conventional gliders and where there was considerable interest in general gliding flight, as evidenced by experimentation with Rogallo wings and by the development of the first lifting bodies by the same people, around the same time and place. These pilots did see the rocket-powered X-15 as a glider.

For glider pilots, at least, its a no-brainer. 89.26.203.111 22:30, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

Category:Gliding vs. Category:Gliders
Category:Gliders is itself a category within Category:Gliding. — Robert Greer (talk) 20:31, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

Motor-gliders
Having discovered a French website,, listing large numbers of gliders, I have started to incorporate them into this list. Unfortunately the website compilers idea of a motorglider seems to include what most people would regard as light or ultra-light aircraft. I have followed the websites categorisation including all aircraft listed. If anybody has alternate references which can separate the light aircraft from the motorgliders then please edit the list, though I would ask that the editor check with List of aircraft to make sure that the aircraft is listed there before deleting.Petebutt (talk) 09:25, 10 May 2011 (UTC)

Miscellaneous constructors
I have moved all the Miscellaneous constructors entries to their own section at the end of the list.Petebutt (talk) 09:25, 10 May 2011 (UTC)

Inclusion of rocket powered gliders
The rocket powered gliders like the Me 163 Komet and X-15 are gliders in part of their flight by default - at that stage they have exhausted their fuel. You could by that token argue that the Fairey Fireflash was a glider. As such I do not believe that such aircraft belong in the main listing. GraemeLeggett 08:37, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

I suppose GraemmeLeggett's point depends somewhat on your definition of glider. Many of us associated gliders with sailplanes -- aircraft that can climb in rising air. But not all gliders are sailplanes. Troop/cargo carrying gliders of WW-II would be an example. Sailplanes and cargo gliders share one essential property: gliding is the essence of their function. This is not true of the Me-163 -- which is really a fighter. And it's not true of the X-15, the Space Shuttle, or SpaceShip one -- which are all essentially spacecraft. Wind Borne 01:35, 26 June 2008 (UTC)
 * I know the thread has gone cold, but the criteria must relate to the part of flight that the aircraft was designed to give useful work. Just because something has to glide in to land, whilst NOT performing its useful task, does not necessarily make it sensible to include it in this list.Petebutt (talk) 20:19, 12 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Further to this, the Me 163 Komet was actually designed to carry out its task whilst being flown as a glider, so it definitely warrants inclusion in any list of gliders. The X-15 was primarily designed to carry out its task under power, but some flights were intended to provide data during gliding flight so the X-15 is also a likely candidate.Petebutt (talk) 07:42, 13 May 2011 (UTC)

Orphaned references in List of gliders
I check pages listed in Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting to try to fix reference errors. One of the things I do is look for content for orphaned references in wikilinked articles. I have found content for some of List of gliders's orphans, the problem is that I found more than one version. I can't determine which (if any) is correct for this article, so I am asking for a sentient editor to look it over and copy the correct ref content into this article.

Reference named "JAWA60": From Ikarus Meteor:  From Bréguet Br 904 Nymphale:  

Reference named "JAWA66": From Slingsby Dart:  From Oberlerchner Mg 23:  From Bölkow Phoebus:  From List of aircraft (P):  From LIBIS-17: </li> </ul>

Reference named "Hardy":<ul> <li>From PIK-3: Hardy 1982, p.74</li> <li>From Scheibe SF 34: Hardy 1982, p.83</li> </ul>

I apologize if any of the above are effectively identical; I am just a simple computer program, so I can't determine whether minor differences are significant or not. AnomieBOT ⚡ 18:51, 15 July 2012 (UTC)

proposed merge in of Glider types

 * oppose The article to merge in has nothing to add to the current lists. Images are not used in List of gliders to keep the list sizes down to manageable levels. Around 100,000 bytes is a reasonable maximum, which still allows browsers to edit without too much trouble. More than that and they suffer serious problems. Other information is also restricted in scope and does not include specifications etc..--Petebutt (talk) 14:49, 20 April 2016 (UTC)


 * Oppose as clearly the other article will be nominated for deletion or redirected as it doesnt appear to discuss glider types that is not already covered in this article or Glider (aircraft). MilborneOne (talk) 15:30, 20 April 2016 (UTC)


 * oppose The Glider types list presents the most significant glider types in date order with an image and the key performance data in an easy sortable format. The two different pages serve very different and distinct functions Tadpolefarm  (talk) 15:15, 27 April 2016 (UTC)


 * Oppose as there is nothing to merge. The offending article is up for deletion and that is the best solution.&mdash; Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 15:47, 1 May 2016 (UTC)

two questions
1. Why is there a space after the open parenthesis in all of the country-specific pages? (e.g. List of gliders ( Belgian miscellaneous constructors))

2. "[nationality adjective] miscellaneous constructors" seems like really awkward wording to me. As I don't know anything about the subject, it may be a field-specific convention/jargon I'm not familiar with. Does it mean the same as "List of Belgian gliders" or "List of gliders constructed in Belgium"? &mdash; <span style="font-family:monospace, monospace;"> Rhododendrites <sup style="font-size:80%;">talk  \\ 19:10, 1 May 2016 (UTC)

Country lists
If someone wants a list of all French (say) gliders, they would probably search on List of French gliders. However, doing this only lists miscellaneous French gliders. I think this is very confusing/misleading. Since the main list is organized alphabetically by manufacturer, why is the misc list arranged by country? We need to decide either to list alphabetically or by country, not one here and the other there.TSRL (talk) 16:37, 16 January 2019 (UTC)

Gliders A-Z not visible in mobile version
The list of links to the 'Gliders A-Z' list sites is not visible in mobile view. Spam.und.co (talk) 18:58, 17 October 2019 (UTC)