By : Allan Ash

One of the most popular and wide used sailplanes ever designed was the Grunau Baby.

Designed in 1931 by Edmund Schneider, the Grunau Baby underwent development over the next fifteen years and was built in untold thousands by manufacturers and amateur builders all over the world.

The GVC Grunau Baby at Laverton, Vic, in 1938

The original Schneider factory, in the town of Grunau in what was then eastern Germany, is reputed to have built more than 2000 Grunau Babies in their various marks. The type was also commercially produced in other countries including Sweden, Holland, France, Spain and Britain.

In addition, hundreds more were constructed by amateur builders throughout the world, including Australia.

The basic Grunau Baby design also served as the basis for many other designs including the Kirby Kite, Cambridge, Wolf, Baby Albatross and Krajanek.

When the Grunau Baby 1 was designed it was considered to be quite an advanced sailplane. Its glide ratio of 17 was almost as good as other current designs. It was light, easy to fly, strong, docile, acrobatic and capable of being aero towed.

Grunau Baby VH-GHY "Mr.Snoopy" circa 1982

The Baby 1 had a ply covered fuselage of hexagon cross section and the strut braced wing of 12.8 span had differential ailerons and a thick Gottingen 535 aerofoil that gave good lift at slow speeds and a gentle stall.

In 1933 the design was modified to a 13.5 span, a roomier cockpit and a redesigned tail unit. One of the first of these, designated Grunau Baby 2, was flown by German pilot Kurt Schmidt for 36 hours, which remained a world duration record until 1949.

Construction plans for the Baby 2 were sold to amateur builders in many countries.

ASC Grunau Baby at the 1959/60 SA state comps, held at Renmark

Then followed the Baby 2A which had spoilers and improved ailerons, and the Baby 2B which had a longer nose, wider cockpit and airbrakes. This latter model proved to be the most popular version of the design and was the one most built.

Soon after the end of WW2, the Grunau Baby 3 was designed and was built in small numbers in Germany. It was little more than an improved 2B model but it also had a cockpit canopy and a landing wheel in place of the former skidded undercarriage.

When Edmund Schneider and his family moved to Australia in 1951 the baby 3 was again slightly updated to be the Baby 3A. Only one 3A was ever built. It is still around. Throughout the various versions the original Gottingen 535 aerofoil was retained.

All the Grunau Babies flown in Australia were the Baby 2 version, although some were modified with such things as cockpit canopies and landing wheels.

Sunraysia's Grunau Baby also at Renmark

The first Grunau Baby to come to Australia was built by Schneiders in Germany and was imported by the Gliding Club of Victoria in 1937. It was painted a glossy grey. Australia’s second Grunau Baby was built from plans by Arthur Farmer in Perth. It was unpainted with a varnished wood finish, polished to a standard described as “like a grand piano”. It first flew in 1940.

After the end of WW2, the only way to get a sailplane was to build it yourself and the only available plans were for the Grunau Baby 2. During the decade from 1945 to 1955 a total of nine of these were built to become the backbone of the early postwar gliding movement in this country.

However, it seems that the plans available (all copies of a set whose origin is not known) were not a full set of construction drawings but were instead only maintenance drawings which did not include all the small details. This left a number of details to the imagination or experience of the builders.

The 'black and white' Grunau Baby at Gawler SA, during the 1960/61 nationals, preparing for a winch launch

Perhaps the most important detail missing was the way in which the 20mm square wooden longerons were bent into a double curve to form the nose of the fuselage. Every builder faced the impossible task of trying to bend the sturdy longerons in two directions at once. The result was that virtually every Grunau built in Australia had a slightly different shaped nose.

What the available drawings didn’t show was that this double curve was achieved not by bending the 20 mm square longerons but by splicing onto the front end of them several layers of thinner timber which were curved to shape first and then glued together to make a successful 20 mm square double curve for the nose.

The substitution of locally available timber and plywood in place of the German specified material led to most Australian Babied being heavier than the design weight.

Though the glide ratio of 17 or 18 is not impressive by today’s standards, it was acceptable in its day and the Baby’s other features compensated well for pilots who had little flying experience, which applied to us all in those days. Overall, it was a very forgiving aircraft.

My log book shows I have flown a total of 32 hours in Grunau Babies and a further 23 hours in sailplanes that wee similar in most respects to this type.

VH-GHM revisits Gawler for the ASC 40th anniversary in 1984. The GB2 was the club's first single seater sailplane, and was built by club members.

Modern pilots would find the Baby’s handling characteristics were inadequate, perhaps frightening. While the elevator was quite sufficient for its job, I always considered that the rudder was under powered, while the ailerons were very slow to react.

Although the wing had differential ailerons they still produced a lot of adverse yaw so that every turn required a good bootful of ruder.

With no spoilers or airbrakes, the usual method of approach in a Baby included a sideslip. Provided the airspeed was kept low the sideslip was easy to achieve but if the speed was a little high the rudder could not keep the nose from dropping away to increase speed even further. The result was a long float before touchdown and a long walk for the ground crew.

On the other hand, if the slip was attempted at too slow a speed the pilot would find himself at two or three hundred feet altitude approaching stalling speed with crossed controls. Fortunately, the Baby had a very gradual, gentle and well marked stall so that recovery action could usually be taken before anything drastic developed.

Of course, this led to Grunau pilots becoming rather careless about maintaining a safe approach speed. While we got away with it in the Grunau, it was a different matter when we later began to fly the EoN Olympia which was not as forgiving. Several pilots had close calls until they learned to keep a safe speed on their landing approach.

The Hinkler Soaring Club, of which I was a member in the 1950s, had two Grunau Babies, one painted blue and the other silver.

In those days, very little care was taken when building a sailplane to check that the centre of gravity was within it design limits. The aircraft were built to the drawings and it was assumed that things like the cg position would take care of themselves. There was no allowance made for the fact that building materials were different, instrumentation was different and pilot weights were different.

In those days, when I was dressed for flying the open cockpit Grunau, I weighed somewhere about 90 kg (I was a hefty lad then, unlike today when I have a flying weight of about 75 kg) and I found that both our Grunaus were nose heavy with me in the cockpit.

The silver Grunau was only slightly nose heavy but the blue one was very nose heavy. I could never fly it hands off and after an hour in the air in it may arm and shoulder were aching from the constant application of back pressure. Later we put some lead weight on the tail which helped a lot.

The low flying speed of the Baby helped in soaring. At an airspeed of about 33 mph, it was easy to tuck into the core of a thermal or float along in no sink under a cloud or above a group of trees or a creek in the later afternoon.

A disadvantage of the high lift aerofoil became evident when aerobatics were attempted. To achieve a really high speed in a Grunau Baby (say, above 50 mph) required a prolonged dive because the speed built up relatively slowly.

A simple wingover needed at least 60 mph to start with, otherwise there was not enough speed to complete a neat turn at the top of the climb. A loop called for 85 mph and a fairly rapid back stick to get the nose up quickly before the speed washed off.

Some pilots achieved the speed by a long shallow dive but I always preferred to start with a firm stick forward movement and a steep, short dive. It looked rather spectacular and it cost less height. This was important because in many instances we did our loops off the top of a winch launch to about 1000 ft.

Going over the top was sometimes scary as it had to be achieved very rapidly before the wing stalled. On several occasions I could clearly bear the pitter-patter of dust falling from the lower surface fabric of the wing to the inverted upper surface as I seemed to poise momentarily before the downward curve began.

I never actually stalled before going over the top but there were pilots who did. I remember an incident at Gawler about 1956 when Forbes Walker (whom many old ASC members will fondly remember) began a loop at about 1000 ft but on the upward curve he realised he didn’t have enough speed to get over the top, so he pushed the stick hard forward.

The resulting manoeuvre was a cross between a bunt and a tailslide. We all enjoyed the spectacle except Forbes.

Grunau Babies had a reputation for being unspinable, but while this was generally true, there were exceptions which caused some unexpected frights. I tried several times to spin the Hinkler club Grunaus but, probably because they were nose heavy, they always turned into spiral dives. As soon as the nose dropped below the horizon the speed built up and the attempted spin had to be abandoned.

My first ever thermal flight was a climb from 600 ft to 2000 ft in a Grunau Baby. It remains as one of the big thrills in my life, despite making many better flights later.

While the Grunau Baby type, with its thick, high lift aerofoil, was not a fast cross country mount, it provided many pilots with good distance flights and its ability to climb while flying slowly straight ahead through a thermal or beneath a cloud could result in reasonably fast XC speeds.

It has been said that the baby could fly almost as far as the sailplanes of the following generation. It just took longer to do it.

But good speeds could be obtained if the conditions were right for it. For example, the distance leg for my Silver Badge was flown in 1951 in our blue Grunau Baby. I covered 90 km in 90 minutes on a day of no wind but broad blue-sky thermals in which I could gain 600 to 800ft while crossing at an airspeed of about 35 mph.

Good flights in Grunaus by other pilots include an O&R of 195 km in 4 hr 30 min by Ted Desmond of the GCV, 212 km in 5 hours by Fred Hoinville, 170 km in 4 hours by Dave Darbyshire and many of 100 to 150 km by pilots in SA, NSW, WA, NSW and Victoria.

One of the great features of the Grunau Baby was its ruggedness. It needed to be strong to withstand the treatment often given it by inexperienced pilots. But its inherent strength was often proved by more experienced pilots too.

In January 1949, Keith Chamberlin of the Gliding Club of Victoria set new national records for gain in height and maximum height when he soared the club’s 12 year old open cockpit grey Grunau to a maximum of 12,800 ft inside an enormous cu-nimb cloud.

After taking off from Benalla he was dawn up into the cloud and made a rapid and almost uncontrolled climb which included inverted flight and high speed spiral dives, ending with a period of sink which measured 350 feet a second on the barograph!

Emerging from the cloud at 800 ft, half frozen and bruised and battered by hail, Chamberlin landed the Grunau in pouring rain in a paddock not far from Benalla.

Other pilots also achieved high climbs in Grunaus, though in less spectacular circumstances. Hinkler club pilot Bob Krick soared a Grunau Baby to 12,000 ft at Narromine and fellow pilot Aub Parsons reached 11,000 ft during a cross country flight from Camden. In Europe, a number of pilots flew in excess of 300 km in Grunau Babies.

The first double tows in Australia included the Hinkler club’s blue Grunau and EoN Olympia. After a successful trial at Camden in December 1951, the two sailplanes were towed by Fred Hoinville in his Tiger Moth, with Kevin Moloney in the Grunau and Bob Krick in the Olympia. After an uneventful two across the Blue Mountains they reached Narromine after a non-stop two of 3 hrs 30 minutes.

Two weeks later Fred double towed the two sailplanes back to Camden with Ray Ash in the Grunau and Bob Krick in the Olympia.

Many pilots of the Gliding Club of Victoria, Adelaide Soaring Club, Hinkler Soaring Club, Gliding Club of WA, Sunraysia and Renmark clubs made cross country flights in their Grunaus and the early national contests saw Grunaus competing.

Two Grunaus were entered in the first centralised nationals, held at Tocumwal in 1956. A handicap system was used and this allowed one of the Grunaus (it was painted black and white) flown by a team from the VMFG to finish in second place overall and third in the teams event.

The black and while Grunau was also entered in the second nationals held at Benalla in 1960. Flown by Wally Williams of Perth, it finished 9th in a lineup of 16 sailplanes, including an L0150, Skylark 2, BGI1, Gull 4 and Olympia. Among its contest flights the black and while Grunau flew distances of 165, 140, 131 and 102 km.

I believe that of the ten or eleven Grunau Babies that once existed in Australia there are still six in existence, though I don’t think any of them are currently airworthy, which is a shame.

In 1953, Harry Schneider designed a new single seater sailplane designated the Grunau 4 though it bore no resemblance to the Grunau Baby 2 or 3 design.

It was a new concept that spanned the gap between the old European style of lightweight, slow flying sailplanes and the newly emerging heavier and faster designs.

The Grunau 4 retained the hex-sectioned fuselage and strut braced wing but it had a more modern (for those days) Gottingen 549 aerofoil which gave a better performance at higher speeds. With a span of 13.5 m, it had a glide ratio of 22.

Only four of these aircraft were built and all are still in existence and flown regularly. They have been used by various pilots to gain silver distance and make other longer flights. The most outstanding flight was made in 1982 when Ray Ash flew a triangle of 320 km in just under eight hours, in what he described as good but not exceptional conditions.

It is expected that a Grunau 4 owned by Wally Wolf will be at the Vintage Glider Association’s regatta at Locksley, near Shepparton, Victoria, from 2-10 January.

Reproduced from Australian Gliding (September/October 1998)

I would like to acknowledge the use of information from Martin Simons’ book Vintage Sailplanes, 1908-1945” in preparing this article.

As a project for the Vintage Glider Association I am trying to trace the history and fate of the many Grunau Babies that were built and flown in Australia.

I would be pleased to hear from anyone who has ever built, owned or flown one of these sailplanes or who has any information about their history or present whereabouts, dead or alive.

Please contact me at 2 Heath Avenue, Frankston 3199, phone (03) 9766 0146, day or night.

I have virtually done all my solo flying in the Indian version of the Grunau Baby, the ITG-3, as it is called in India. This includes my Silver 'C' standards in height, duration and distance. To me this project by Allan Ash is of great interest and I am willing to help him in any way that he would need my assistance.