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Over 100 years ago, a group of aeronautical experimenters led by Octave Chanute flew a series of glider designs along the Southern shore of Lake Michigan. An authentic replica of their most successful biplane design was engineered, constructed, tested and safely flown by the author. The avocational project was a multi-disciplinary educational adventure in the context of recreating a part of early aviation history. This paper discusses early history, engineering and construction, flight test results, and educational aspects of the replica project.

A new low Reynolds number, natural laminar flow airfoil design and its impact on performance of a generic light sailplane are presented. Several previously published airfoils, the Liebeck/Camacho LA203A and the Somers/Maughmer SM701, were used as a starting point. They are examined along with several new attempts to further the state of the art for natural laminar flow, single element airfoils. The computational tool XFOIL was used to analyze these airfoils, and the resulting data were adjusted and applied to a generic Sporting Class sailplane design. The results indicated that overall performance improvements are possible over the SM701, the LA203A, and a third reference airfoil.