Lindbergh, Pittsburgh and the Hornberg

Martin Schempp emigrated to America in 1926 at 21 and was working as a lab chemist in a steel mill when a lecture by Charles Lindbergh made him want to fly. He went home to learn, met Wolf Hirth, went back to the United States to build German sailplanes under licence and teach gliding near Pittsburgh, and won the altitude prize at the 1932 national contest at Elmira. Hirth, son of a Stuttgart engineering family, had lost a leg in a motorcycle crash in 1924 and flew on a wooden prosthesis; he had the fibula from the amputated leg made into a cigarette holder. In 1934 Hirth, then running the gliding school on the Hornberg, offered Schempp a job.

The Minimoa and the gull wing

In 1935 Schempp founded his own firm in Göppingen with Hirth’s help. The first product, the Gö 1 Wolf, was a trainer meant to rival the Grunau Baby; the hit was the Gö 3 Minimoa, a wood-and-fabric single-seater with a cranked gull wing. It was the first glider built to carry water ballast, set a world altitude record of 6,687 metres in a thunderstorm in 1938 and won the American championships in 1937 and 1938. About 110 were built. In 1938 Hirth became a partner, the company became Schempp-Hirth and it moved to Kirchheim unter Teck. By 1939 it had customers on every continent but Australia.

Bf 109 tails, beds and wheelbarrows

War turned the woodworkers to Luftwaffe work: training gliders such as the Habicht, wooden assemblies for the Me 321 and Me 323 giants and tail units for the Bf 109. The firm also built the Gö 9, a small test aircraft for Dornier to prove the pusher propeller and cruciform tail of the Do 335. In 1945 the Americans made Schempp interim mayor of Kirchheim, and the factory survived the ban on aircraft by making beds, wheelbarrows, radio cabinets, artificial legs and even dummy F-86 jets. Gliding returned in 1951.

Holighaus and the plastic revolution

Hirth died in 1959 after a heart attack at the controls of an aerobatic glider. Schempp licence-built the Standard Austria and, sensing that plastics were the future, hired a young Darmstadt graduate, Klaus Holighaus, in the mid-1960s. Holighaus produced the glass-fibre Cirrus and then, in his spare time, the 22-metre Nimbus prototype, a brute to fly on which George Moffat won the 1970 World Championship at Marfa, Texas. The two-seat Janus, the swept-wing Discus and the carbon-winged Ventus followed. The Discus won six consecutive Standard Class world titles from 1985 to 1995.

A family firm at the top

Schempp handed over management in 1969 and 1972 and in 1977 made Holighaus sole owner. Holighaus was killed on 9 August 1994 when his Nimbus-4M struck the Rheinwaldhorn in the Swiss Alps. The company passed to his widow and sons, all glider pilots, and is run by Tilo and Brigitte Holighaus with about 100 staff. It builds the Discus-2, Ventus, Arcus, Quintus and Duo Discus, and has long licensed production, including the Discus CS in the Czech Republic. Distance records have been set again and again on Nimbus and Discus variants.

المصانع

• Göppingen · Göppingen — First workshop, 1935–1938
• Kirchheim unter Teck · Kirchheim unter Teck — Headquarters and factory since 1938
• Schempp-Hirth Výroba · Czech Republic — Licence production of the Discus CS, about 12 a year

الناس

• Martin Schempp · founder — 1905–1984; interim mayor of Kirchheim in 1945
• Wolf Hirth · co-founder, designer — 1900–1959; first to correctly identify wave lift; died after a heart attack in flight
• Klaus Holighaus · designer, owner from 1977 — Designed Cirrus, Nimbus, Janus, Discus, Ventus; killed in 1994
• George Moffat · American glider pilot — Won the 1970 World Championship in the Nimbus prototype
• Tilo Holighaus · managing director

الأرقام القياسية والأولويات

• Gö 3 Minimoa: world altitude record for gliders, 6,687 m, 1938
• Discus: six consecutive Standard Class World Gliding Championships, 1985–1995
• Nimbus prototype: 1970 World Gliding Championship, Marfa, Texas