Daredevil Flies Glider Plane First Introduced In 1938

Incredible onboard flight footage from a Schulgleiter "SG38" single-seat primary glider, filmed at Eutingen Airport in Germany. The glider was first introduced in 1938, and was designed to be a training aircraft for basic flight exercises.

The Schulgleiter SG-38 (in English it means “School glider") is a high-wing, cable-braced, single-seat primary glider that was first built in Grunau, Germany in 1938, hence the designation. The usual launch method was to be dragged with a rope down a sloped hill and since it was a training vessel for solo flights, it was made to be easy to fly.

The footage shows a daredevil, equipped with a GoPro camera in one hand and the “control", if you can even call it that, in the other, gliding with a replica of the “Hitler Youth Glider" above the German countryside.

The Germans faced strict limits on developing or using powered aircraft after World War One. That is why they turned to gliders for studying aerodynamics and training pilots. In 1933 the Germans formed the DFS (Deutsche Forschungsanstalt für Segelflug or German Research Institute for Sailplane Flight) to centralize all gliding activity in Germany and produce training gliders for both the Hitler Youth Flyers (Hitlerjugend Flieger or HJ-Flieger) and Luftwaffe.