Edmund Schneider
Edmund Schneider was a German aircraft designer and founder of a glider construction company. He played a significant role in the development of early training and competition gliders, including the widely used Grunau Baby. His contributions to glider design continued after World War II, leading him to establish operations in Australia, where he further influenced the sport of gliding.
Career
Early life
Schnieder was born in Ravensburg on 26 July 1901 and completed a carpentry apprenticeship in Memmingen. Toward the end of the First World War, he applied to join the German Air Combat Forces but was deemed unfit to fly. Instead, he found work as a carpenter at the Schleissheim Aircraft Workshop, where military aircraft were repaired. This position allowed him to study the design of fighter aircraft from manufacturers such as Pfalz, Albatros Flugzeugwerke, LFG, Fokker, and Junkers.Hesse
At the end of the war, Schneider moved to the Wasserkuppe mountain range gliding site in the state of Hesse in the spring of 1923. There, he met Gottlob Espenlaub and assisted in completing gliders designed by Alexander Lippisch for the Rhön competition that summer.Grunau
In the autumn 1923, Schneider accompanied Espenlaub to Grunau near Hirschberg, Lower Silesia, which was then part of Weimar Germany, at the invitation of a local group from the German Flying Club. Over the winter, they developed a stable training glider designed for simplicity of construction and operation. After several modifications, this design led to the creation of the Espenlaub-Schneider ESG-9, a basic training glider. While Espenlaub later relocated to Kassel, Schneider remained in Grunau, where he established his own glider construction company, Segelflugzeugbau Edmund Schneider, in 1928. His most notable design was the Schneider Grunau Baby, which became widely produced. By approximately 1931, around 3,000 units had been manufactured at his Grunau facility.In addition to the company's own aircraft, commissioned designs were also produced, including the Wiesenbaude 1 and Wiesenbaude 2 gliders for Eugen Bönsch, as well as the fuselage of Wolf Hirth's glider, Moazagotl. Hirth served as the principal of the Grunau gliding school in 1931–1932.