A few weeks back I asked Steve Pearson at Wills Wing to go back
and compile the history of Wills Wing hang glider prices since they started
selling hang glider in 1973. Forty years of glider production and sales. I
wanted to see exactly how prices had changed over that time period and I needed
to go to the sources to get the details.

Steve was excited about the project and although he has a heavy workload at the
factory (they run a very lean ship there) he got on it right away.

Steve produced this chart:

CPI is consumer price index, or the measure of inflation or the decreasing value
of money. The little brown dots are all the gliders that Wills Wing has produced
since 1975.  Early on there was only one or two models but later there is a
full range with some years four different models. You can see that by noticing
in the chart brown square arrayed vertically in a given year. This is the price
spread from the Falcons at the bottom and the most expensive model at the top,
say the T2C.

The prices on the vertical axis are the actual (or nominal) prices for the
gliders for the given year.

Steve also drew a couple of lines that show the decreasing value of money over
time. For example, the blue line illustrates the fact that $950 in July 1975 was
equivalent to

$4029 in July 2012.

If you look closely at the blue line you will notice something quite
interesting. The Falcon pricing (it starts in 1994) dips below the Falcon-Class
CPI line (the Falcon prices are the ones on the bottom after 1993). This means
that the real cost of a Falcon has decreased over time. That the Falcon, which
has performance equal to the highest performance Wills Wing gliders produced
before 1980, has stayed at about the same price or a little less than the
original top performing Wills Wing gliders, if we use inflation adjusted
dollars.

Remember that the Falcon is a much better glider than what was available from
Wills Wing prior to 1980. It has equivalent performance but has better handling,
lighter weight (7075 tubing) and the quality of construction has improved. And
you get this at a reduced real price.

Steve put the red line, the Competition Class CPI line, through the HP AT in
1989. This is to account for the fact that the performance of the top performing
gliders increased over time and the comparison isn't between completely comparable gliders.
You'll notice that the T2's are below that line.

I've made Steve's chart a little more clear by focusing just on the top
performing Wills Wing gliders for any given year:

The top performing Wills Wing glider increases in real cost in the late
eighties, then stays steady until the mid naughts where the T2's decrease in
cost while the T2C's get more expensive. The carbon bits.

If we look just at comparable Falcon-Class gliders (and the earlier top
performing Wills Wing gliders) we get:

We continue to get value for money when it comes to gliders that have best L/D's
at 9:1 or less. The real cost of these gliders has actually fallen over the
years.

We'll examine this more closely in the next article.