What is this all about?
As a novice sailplane pilot I found my self thinking about buying one ship on my own. While it is not hard to find websites listing many used gliders, it is quite hard for a newcomer to understand the real value of any offering. So I decided to serve myself by building this website.
GliderReview is meant to help glider pilots to understand the characteristics of a glider when not able to evaluate them on their own.
Our principles
- Wholeness
- We want our reviews to go beyond mere technical specifications. Apparently equivalent gliders may feature very different handling and flying behaviour. We want our reviews to provide crisp data along with fuzzy opinions.
- Pareto principle
- There are already tons of websites listing gliders and we may end up never listing as many gliders as they do. We don't care. We don't aim to be some sort of glidopedia. We base our glider selection on this rule: most of transactions about used gliders are about a very small bunch of gliders out there. We will focus on those gliders.
- Crowdsourcing
- We will always foster an open culture building our reviews on crowdsourced data. We welcome public input, feedback and debate about gliders.
- Experience
- We want to stand on the shoulders of a giant. We will always try to select and embed experienced pilots' reviews along with crowdsourced material, in order to resonate with our Wholeness principle. We believe that only by bringing influential authors and the voice of the crowd together our users will be able to trust our reviews.
Our sources
Our reviews are made of both editorial and crowdsourced parts.
We strive to let people passionated about soaring to evaluate as much fine-grained detail as possible. Usability of the website and clarity of the reviews are the only constraints here.
Our editorial content is sourced this way:
- Technical specs are based on gliders manuals as provided by manufacturers. If we can't manage to get one we rely on Wikipedia.
- Text reviews are written by some experienced pilot who flew the sailplane. If we don't know any we try to have the reviews written by experienced pilots anyway. In both these cases the reviews are signed by the author. If we don't manage to involve any respectable reviewer, well, we write the review on our own, basing our opinion on web searches, forums, newsgroups and mailing lists. For the sake of common decency we don't sign the review in that case.
Special thanks
A special mention goes to Stefano Cherchi, to Dick Johnson, to Wikipedia and all manufacturers.