Whigham GW-5
American glider
The Whigham GW-5 is an American mid-wing, single seat, FAI Standard Class glider that was designed and constructed by Gene Whigham, a retired flight test engineer for Convair.
Design and development
The GW-5 was designed for the standard class and as such it features a constant-chord 15 m (49.2 ft) wing with a Wortmann FX 61-184 airfoil and flaps for glidepath control.
The GW-5 is of all-metal construction. The landing gear is a faired fixed monowheel. The aircraft has a bubble canopy and a conventional low tail.
One GW-5 was built. It was completed in 1980 and registered with the Federal Aviation Administration in the Experimental - Amateur-built category.
Operational history
The sole GW-5 built was sold in September 2012 and the registration has expired. It is not known if the aircraft still exists or not.
“Whigham GW-5” enters the record as american glider. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Whigham, GW-5 and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 8, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7993598. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1980 and 2012.
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This entry incorporates text from “Whigham GW-5” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.