OSTIV Plaque with Klemperer Award to Gerhard Waibel

The OSTIV Plaque with Klemperer Award is awarded to:

Dipl.-Ing. Gerhard Waibel

for his lifetime achievements in sailplane design

Citation

A windowless room, dimly lit by neon tubes in the Low Speed Laboratory of Delft University in the late eighties. Two men standing near the test section of the wind tunnel curiously expecting the tunnel to rev up. This is going to decide a bet between aerodynamicist Loek Boermans and engineer Ger­hard Waibel. Will the laminar boundary layer be able to pass the carefully designed flap gap without being tripped? The positive outcome of this test validates Gerhard’s intuition and adds another performance gain to the sailplane designs in the years to come. However, this is only an episode from more than a working life dedicated to sailplane design.

When teenage Gerhard first laid hands on a sailplane, wood was the material the best gliders were made of. He largely contributed to changing this.

Gerhard Waibel entered the Akaflieg Darmstadt in 1958. With Wolf Lemke, he conceived the D-36 during a practical training in Sheffield, UK. The sailplane D-36 belongs to the first generation of full glass fibre gliders that earned the team involved the OSTIV Prize in 1985.

This masterpiece led him directly into the design office of the company Alexander Schleicher, where he spent the next 39 years until retirement. Technologically he has always tried to think beyond the well-established paths in the search for further progress. His designs were always serious contenders on international competitions and filled grids in large numbers. The ASW 15 was one of the first serial production FRP-gliders in the Standard class (after the Standard Libelle). The ASW 20 and ASW 22 set standards in their classes, while the ASW 24 earned Gerhard an OSTIV Prize for its integral safety cockpit. With the ASW 27 he anticipated today’s trend towards smaller wing areas.

Details of his designs would often have potential for entering textbooks. Technologically he was always looking for progress. His first use of carbon fi­bres were ski-tapes in the fuselage of the ASW 17. So far, the ASW 24 re­mains the sole sailplane type made largely from the lightweight and tough Aramid fibres. He introduced Dyneema as energy absorbing material for cockpits. He was ambitious about landing gears with increased energy absorption, even beyond the point of failure. One of his specialties were kinematics, a well-known example being his flap control systems.

After retirement he was vigorously involved in the Concordia design team.

Gerhard Waibel, experiencing World War II as a small child, never could strip off these experiences. Maybe therefore his international contacts and friend­ships in the sailplane world were so predominantly important to him. During his professional life he attended all WGCs, where he regularly gave presentations on the OSTIV Congresses. He main­tained an intensive exchange with pilots, scientists, designers and students in the whole sailplane world, from both sides of the iron curtain. Over decades he was one of the driving forces in the Sailplane Development Panel. Thereby he had a great influence on the development of airworthiness standards, but also took the ideas and suggestions from the SDP directly into his design office. Not only in this way has he always promoted OSTIV's objectives.