Thud
Without wanting to go down a huge rabbit hole...
Wow. Are they really that bad?
Yes, they probably are. A well respected glider maintenance comoany has had real issues trying to unravel this mess to generate the aircraft that have been recovered. It all stems from the Air Cadet gliding organisation being allowed to go a bit ‘feral’ over a number of years which resulted in poor maintenance practices and incident reporting - documentation, repair processes and general husbandry. During the recovery of some of these aircraft the company found repaired damage to aircraft that had no record of the incident that caused it or the repair scheme that had been undertaken to fix it - repairs like this had to be cut right out and started again, with extra non-destructive testing or replacement of components to ensure that the full extent of any damage was contained in the repair. This means that to try and patch together the provenance of the aircraft’s airworthiness has been very tricky and costly. It should never had happened and luckily no one got hurt because of it. I believe that the decision to ‘pause’ gliding was ABSOLUTELY the right decsion, but the return to flight programme was not so well handled in my humble opinion.
Would I buy one of the G109 Vigilants as a government surplus aircraft for civvy flying? Not a chance. It would be far better to buy a G109 and then paint it to look like a Vigilant!