RRG Fafnir RRG Fafnir The RRG Fafnir, named after the legendary dragon, was a single seat German high performance glider designed by Alexander Lippisch. It won the Rhön competition in 1931 and made several outstanding flights as well as setting a fashion for gull wings. Lippisch began the design of the influential Fafnir in 1929. Its refined design proved difficult to construct and the aircraft was only just ready for flight tests at the start of the 1930 Rhön competition on the Wasserkuppe. The Fafnir was not the first glider with a cantilever wing, for the Darmstadt Konsul had been built seven
RRG Fafnir 2 its technical section, led by Lippisch, moved from the Wasserkuppe to Darmstadt to become the DFS, so the new glider was sometimes known as the DFS Fafnir 2. It was Lippisch's last conventional glider design. The most immediately obvious difference between the two designs was that the Fafnir 2 was a mid-wing aircraft. The original Fafnir had a high wing and initially suffered serious aerodynamic drag losses at the wing-fuselage junctions. Wind tunnel studies at the University of Göttingen showed that these losses were lower with mid-wing designs. They also suggested that the wing and fuselage be integrated and the