On Thursday late afternoon Belinda and I arrived at the Francisco Grande hotel a few minutes after Rob and Trish Kells who had also driven out from Southern California. At dinner that evening we found out from Rob, who is doing well these days and having a great time, that the desire for Wills Wing gliders is so high that they can't meet the current demand (the backlog is twelve weeks right now).

Rob indicated that if they could produce them they would have a market for 775 gliders this year. Last year they sold 610, 580 and 540 the two years respectively before that (these figures are from memory). Recession? What recession? Maybe more folks have time to go out and fly.

Rob is a great salesman and maybe this is just happy talk, and he did seem pretty darn happy. He spoke about demo days last weekend in the Bay Area where he sold gliders to almost everyone who flew a demo. They were particularly impressed with the new T2C.

He also said that everyone now seems to be impressed with the performance of the Sport 2 (as is also indicated on the Oz Report forum from pilot reports), when at first when it came out, the general thought was that it would be just an Eagle with a VG. I liked it when I flew it 170 miles. 

The rumor is that Wills Wing is picking up enhanced distribution/dealers in France (more later). Also there is an upcoming Discovery channel show about Wills Wing with lots of footage about the factory and about hang gliding. I'll know more soon and will pass it along. Perhaps airing near the end of May.