Spieltek produced the first ever technical CD of the 2001 Poway IHLGF contest in 2001. The CD offered a unique new approach to Hand Launch and Discus Launch design and techniques reporting. Its goal were to disseminate techniques and information to those interested in the rapidly expanding HLG/DLG soaring arena. It was way ahead of the technical videos of the time, and if updated today would be way ahead of current DVDs and other technical internet offerings.
The IHLGF 2001 Technical CD presented a technical approach to DLG competition, no interviews; just descriptions, drawings, and info on how the planes were made and what pilots were developing. At the time, there was no central location to find this information, like an encyclopedia of sorts. Currently, there are worldwide blogs of multi-national information and these sources take too much time to search and sort on, then hunt and read all the text just to wade through the common talk and get what is really desired.
Having said all that, I want to tell you that I am a computer database programmer and I have outlined a project that would offer all this goals to all in a much more organized way. The other problem is that I wanted to know the shapes of the Swindell tails and it was not until I contacted Richard directly that he helped. But as each year goes by all the technical information and names of planes that have been made is disappearing. For example, JoeW flew Encores, but if you try to find out anything about them, it is nearly impossible. My idea is to preserve the info before it gets removed by companies going out of business, or discontinuing their websites. I have found is that we are continually re-inventing the wheel. Some techniques used by free flight people have never been seen by DLGers or any other builders. If we adapted methodology from freeflight people we might find out new things for DLG planes. It also works the other way around. Freeflight glider guys moved to throwing their planes using the discus method.
The CD has old files and the new browsers are not outdated. If you click on the index pages, and index simple pages you can see things, then if you mouse over the links you will see the filenames that you can open. If you open them directly by double-clicking, they should open and you can see some very old planes. I was going to do this every year for every contest I went to, but time was not in my favor.
At that time, the Internet was not as evolved as it is today. People interested in discus launched Gliders (DLGs) had no technical information entry into the rapidly expanding DLG field. Other early presentations were developed and produced as videos, blogs, and even local articles as offerings of information available for designers and pilots, however these were very limited and often required considerable effort to locate or read.
As the years have passed these presentations have been lost or links broken, thus no method to review older information. Nowadays, Designers can refer to articles available from magazines, digitally mastered and archived; however there is much more information not in magazines that can be referenced or archived.
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