Okay, let's take the next step and actually express the prices of
the Wills Wing gliders in 1976 dollars which at least a few of you old farts
remember so fondly. Here are the prices of the top performing Wills Wing
gliders:

The vertical scale is 1976 dollars. Just to spread everything out a bit what is
shown are costs from $900 for your early top of the line Wills Wing gliders to
almost $2300 1976 dollars for your brand new T2C with it's carbon outboard
leading edges, and aerodynamic control frame with the carbon base tube (and
carbon sprogs). What we see here is that prices begin to rise in 1980 as double surface
gliders take over the top end. They climb until about 1997 with the Fusion, which
gets a bit ahead of itself cost wise. Prices are steady and then begin to fall through
2013 except for the glider (the T2C) where the carbon pieces start replacing the
aluminum pieces, and even those prices fall in the last few years. (The T2C
prices are shown as the three highest values in the upper right.)

It's clear that through the eighties top performing hang gliders about doubled
in price as they went from single surface to double surface and then other
improvements were made. But since the mid nineties, it is only the addition of
carbon fiber parts than has increased competition class hang glider prices. At
least for those gliders coming from the Wills Wing factory.

How about the Falcon class gliders, those with a best L/D equal to or less than
9:1? Here's what that looks like:

In the early years prices came down swiftly as the business stabilized and
manufacturing efficiencies were incorporated into a successful business (while
many other manufacturers went out of business). When Wills Wing began producing
the Falcon in 1994, it did so at prices similar to what it had produced it's top
of the line single surface gliders prior to 1980 (again as long as we are
counting in constant dollars). As Falcon production ramped up, Wills Wing was
able to produce them at a profit for less cost and passed those saving onto
their customers, so that recent Wills Wings Falcon 4's costs less than $950 in
constant dollars.

So now we have looked at glider prices using a consistent measuring device, 1976
dollars. But the gliders themselves were changing over time, in fact they were
improving, so that pilots were getting more for their money. There were many
improvements that added value, but the single most important improvement was the
increase in gliding performance. Without this improvement, any other of the
improvements would not have been worth nearly as much. In the next article I
will take best glide performance into consideration and see how that affects our calculation
of the value proposition.