The "Kleine Uhu" from Graupner
04/13/2026
When you get a little older, experiences from your childhood are particularly moving. So when I recently came across a documentary about the Graupner company on YouTube, I remembered my own "Little Eagle Owl", which my father gave me as a present around 55 years ago.
The "Little Eagle Owl" was a glider with a wingspan of about one meter, which first had to be painstakingly assembled. My father helped me with this, of course, because I probably wouldn't have been able to do it so well.
I can well remember that I re-covered the wings several times. Rough crashes often resulted in a hole in the covering and I had to pull thin paper over the balsa spars again.
At that time I was quite enthusiastic about model flying, I bought the thick Graupner catalog and dreamed of proportional remote controls and motorized sails. However, I stuck with the "Little Eagle Owl", everything else was simply too expensive. And the catalog also went into the waste paper at some point, and the glider did not survive, nor did the Graupner company. The German company was regarded as a model company for decades, but eventually missed the boat when Far Eastern suppliers flooded the market with cheaper and ready-built models.
