Design Insight: the A-Team

“I’m telling you, you don’t need anything more than an EN-A wing for your entire flying career!” With a whopping eight EN-A gliders in their range, Phi designer Hannes Papesh is clearly a fan of EN-A wings.

Traditionally, the EN-B class has always had the biggest slice of the market. But this is slowly changing, confirms designer Philipp Medicus from Nova: “EN-A has grown to be similar to EN-B.”

The A-class used to be the domain of school gliders. Flying bricks, boring, slow and sluggish to handle....