Schleicher Ka 8B

Rudolf Kaiser joined Alexander Schleicher’s glider works at Poppenhausen, at the foot of the Wasserkuppe in the Rhön, in the early 1950s, and his designs carry his initials: Ka. His Ka 3 and the two-seat Ka 4 Rhönlerche gave German clubs cheap, tough gliders built from a welded steel-tube fuselage covered in fabric and wooden wings. In 1957 he applied the same recipe to a single-seater for pilots who had just gone solo: the Ka 8.

The Ka 8 had a 15-metre wooden wing with fabric covering and airbrakes, a slim steel-tube fuselage with wooden stringers under its fabric, a fixed main wheel and a nose skid. It was light, docile and forgiving, it climbed well in weak thermals, and it was easy to rig, repair and maintain. The Ka 8B of 1958, with detail improvements, became the standard version. Schleicher built it in quantity and also sold it as a kit, so many clubs built their own over the winter, and more than 1,100 were made.

For a generation the Ka 8 was the glider a club pilot flew solo in after leaving the two-seater, and the one in which many made their first long cross-country flights. British clubs bought it in numbers from the early 1960s, alongside the Slingsby gliders, and Ka 8s still fly at clubs in Britain and across Europe more than sixty years on, though glass-fibre sailplanes have long since taken over most of their work. The gazetteer’s museums hold two at the Gliding Heritage Centre at Lasham and a Ka 8B cockpit at the South Yorkshire Aircraft Museum, as well as examples of the earlier Ka 3 and Ka 4.