Model of the month Oktober 2018 Schempp-Hirth
Schempp-Hirth Gö 1 Wolf.
After Wolf Hirt had returned to Germany in 1931 from the USA where he had made gliding known, he became director of the gliding school in Grunau/Silesia, on the edge of the Riesengebirge (Giant Mountains). There he taught Hanna Reitsch to fly.
At the same time the company Edmund Schneider was there, which developed e.g. the „Schädelspalter“ (Skull Splitter), the Grunau ESG 9, a training single seater and soon afterwards the Grunau Baby, which became a global success.
Wolf Hirth signed with his name as developer for the Baby for advertising reasons, but this was not the case at all, Schneider had designed it. Schneider then built the Grunau ESG 8 for Hirth, the famous Moazagotl (see Gö 3 Minimoa).
When Martin Schempp also returned from the USA in the middle of the 1930s, he and Hirth founded a company for sports aircraft construction in Göppingen, which was initially run by Schempp alone. The planes of this company were called Göppingen, abbreviated Gö. By now this world-famous company is still leading in glider construction, the abbreviation today is SH.
The Gö 1 Wolf was developed by the designers Wolf Hirth and Reinhold Seeger as a training glider, competing with the Grunau Baby, which was of similar construction: a strutted high wing glider in wooden construction with fabric covering. Here the landing skid already contained a fixed wheel, while even in post-war versions the Baby still needed a little dolly to be put onto the skid. There was even an aerobatic version of the Gö 1. The performance spectrum roughly corresponded to the Baby IIb. About 100 planes were sold until 1939, production was stopped at the beginning of the war.
Technische Daten Gö 1 Wolf
Spannweite 14,00 m, Länge 9,30 m, Höhe 1,40 m, Flügelfläche 14,5 m², Flügelstreckung 13,5, Flächenbelastung 14,60 kg/m², Gleitzahl 17 bei 60 km/h, geringstes Sinken 0,95 m/s bei 45 km/h, Leermasse 145 kg, Besatzung 1.