AP 118 · No. 10 Section II · Aircraft Plate 62 / 267

Plate 62 of 267 · Between the wars · Single-seat training sailplane

Schneider Grunau Baby

Grunau Baby IIb, BGA 578 ‘AQN’, painted as BGA 578, trigraph ‘AQN’, a Schneider Grunau Baby IIb built by Hawkridge in 1948 (works number G.3348), at the Gliding Heritage Centre, Lasham, where it flew until 2014 after more than 5,000 launches: the single-seat training and club sailplane Edmund Schneider designed at Grunau in Silesia in 1931, a strut-braced high-wing wooden glider with a six-sided plywood fuselage, an open cockpit with a small windscreen, a pylon carrying the two-spar wing, one lift strut a side, a horn-balanced rudder and a landing skid with a small wheel, shown resting tail-down on its skid and tail skid: cream overall, with a two-pronged red flash on the nose, red lift struts, a red band over the wing centre joint and red wing tips, black ‘Grunau Baby’ on the rear fuselage with ‘1948’ above it on the port side, a white ‘BABY G’ placard on the nose and black ‘AQN’ on the fin and rudder, as photographed up to 2017 (shape from the published Grunau Baby IIb three-view scaled to the 13.57 m span; paint and markings following photographs of AQN; the plain cream finish and Hawkridge badge it wore by 2021 are not shown); it stands for the vintage sailplanes in the gazetteer’s museums, from the Scud and the Weihe to the Bocian and the Colditz Cock.

3D model

Turn it over

A procedural model built in Blender from published dimensions, drawings and photographs, painted as BGA 578, trigraph ‘AQN’, a Schneider Grunau Baby IIb built by Hawkridge in 1948 (works number G.3348), at the Gliding Heritage Centre, Lasham, where it flew until 2014 after more than 5,000 launches: the single-seat training and club sailplane Edmund Schneider designed at Grunau in Silesia in 1931, a strut-braced high-wing wooden glider with a six-sided plywood fuselage, an open cockpit with a small windscreen, a pylon carrying the two-spar wing, one lift strut a side, a horn-balanced rudder and a landing skid with a small wheel, shown resting tail-down on its skid and tail skid: cream overall, with a two-pronged red flash on the nose, red lift struts, a red band over the wing centre joint and red wing tips, black ‘Grunau Baby’ on the rear fuselage with ‘1948’ above it on the port side, a white ‘BABY G’ placard on the nose and black ‘AQN’ on the fin and rudder, as photographed up to 2017 (shape from the published Grunau Baby IIb three-view scaled to the 13.57 m span; paint and markings following photographs of AQN; the plain cream finish and Hawkridge badge it wore by 2021 are not shown); it stands for the vintage sailplanes in the gazetteer’s museums, from the Scud and the Weihe to the Bocian and the Colditz Cock. Drag to orbit, scroll or pinch to zoom · download .glb (403 KB)

Data plate

Specification

First flight, number built and top speed are for the whole family (Grunau Baby, Scud, Weihe, Hütter 17, Bergfalke, Bocian, Foka, Colditz Cock et al.); engine, crew and dimensions are for the Grunau Baby IIb, BGA 578 ‘AQN’ modelled here.

History

The Grunau Baby

In 1931 Edmund Schneider, a glider builder at Grunau in Silesia, designed a simple single-seat sailplane for the gliding school on the hill there: a strut-braced high wing of wood and fabric, a plywood fuselage with an open cockpit, and gentle handling that a pupil could manage on the first flights after leaving the primary glider. It was meant to carry a newly qualified pilot from short hops down the hillside to real soaring, and Schneider called it the Baby.

The Grunau Baby II of 1932 and the improved IIb that followed became the standard intermediate glider of the German gliding movement in the 1930s. Plans and kits went to clubs and schools across Germany, and German factory records count 4,104 built by 1945, many of them for the state-run training of young pilots. It was built under licence in Britain, where Slingsby made a version as the T.5, and in several other European countries, and after the war France built it as the Nord 1300. With the post-war production, about 6,000 were made in some 20 countries, more than any other sailplane of its day.

After the war the Baby carried on as a club glider in Britain and across Europe. Hawkridge Aircraft of Dunstable built new Baby IIbs in the late 1940s, and many British pilots made their first solo soaring flights in one. Schneider himself moved to Australia in 1951 and built gliders at Adelaide. Grunau Babies are still flown at vintage glider rallies, and there are examples in British collections at the Gliding Heritage Centre at Lasham and at the Norfolk & Suffolk Aviation Museum.

This airframe

Grunau Baby IIb BGA 578 ‘AQN’

BGA 578The airframe modelled

BGA 578, known by its trigraph AQN, was built by Hawkridge Aircraft in 1948 as works number G.3348 and appears to have joined the London Gliding Club at Dunstable around 1951; its log suggests a great deal of hill soaring there. It later passed through several owners and was left abandoned at Lasham, not flying from 1983 to 1990 or from 1992 to 1997, until members of the vintage glider group there rescued it. Gary Pullen owned it from 2004, flew it 60 km in April 2010, and made its last recorded flight on 9 August 2014, when it had logged about 2,400 hours from more than 5,200 launches. It is now with the Gliding Heritage Centre at Lasham. The model shows it in the cream and red scheme it wore in photographs up to 2017, resting tail-down on its skid and tail skid: cream overall with a two-pronged red flash on the nose, red lift struts, a red band over the wing centre joint and red wing tips, black ‘Grunau Baby’ on the rear fuselage with ‘1948’ above it on the port side, a white ‘BABY G’ placard on the nose and black ‘AQN’ on the fin and rudder. By 2021 it had been repainted plain cream with a Hawkridge badge on the rudder; that scheme is not shown. The shape follows the Grunau Baby IIb three-view on Wikimedia Commons, scaled to the 13.57 m span. The model stands for all the vintage sailplanes in the gazetteer’s museums, from the Scud and the Weihe to the Bocian and the Colditz Cock.

See it at The Gliding Heritage Centre

Where to see one

In the gazetteer

The gazetteer records the Grunau Baby in 7 UK collections. The airframe modelled here is marked.

Every airframe and serial All 267 plates

Profiles and models are procedural interpretations built in Blender from published dimensions, three-view drawings and photographs of each airframe. Treat the museum aircraft as the reference.