The ASH-26E Motor Glider that Wasn’t
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I spent the last two week trying to jump through hoops and buy the order position for an Alexander Schleicher ASH-26E motor glider currently under construction in Germany. It would have meant having a great motor glider here for the peak of this years soaring season. Unfortunately the deal with the current purchaser fell through when he changed his mind and decided to keep the glider. Things were happening so quick and the glider was on such a quick delivery timeframe that I was crunching through options and panel configurations. I even had checked on insurance and started to reserve a N-number. Sigh. So I’m left without a glider but with a panel layout that I like.
I used the Word document from Schleicher that has a graphical panel layout in it. Not sure why they distribute it in Word. I copied the graphic elements over to PowerPoint and also hacked them with Photoshop and some images to mock up what it would look like. Who knows if everything on the panel would have been able to fit perfectly.
Big things for me are the 3 1/8″ United Instruments 5934 series altimeter, a larger airspeed indicator is also nice and if possible using Klixon circuit breakers on the panel instead of the usual fuses. The Altimeter is really important for me, after sitting in a ASH-26E and looking at the 2 1/4″ diameter 20,000′ Winter altimeter it just looks very small and difficult to read compared to the larger 3 1/8″ diameter United altimeter that I fly with now.
