Comparing the Lilienthal and Wright gliders, which one had a better glide ratio?
Otto Lilienthal saw flying as something similar to bicycling: A sport and an opportunity to spend time out in Mother nature. Therefore, he designed all his airplanes such that they would fit through the door of a standard Reichsbahn freight wagon. He used a central truss (Gestellkreuz) to which willow stakes could be bolted such that they would fold backwards. He covered this structure with waxed cotton cloth and used wooden ribs to shape the airfoil of these wings. Consequently, the wingspan of his designs was limited.

The next limitation was his way of controlling his aircraft only by weight shifting. Since his hands were already busy with holding on to the aircraft, he could not use them to move control surfaces. His drawings and his correspondence show that he considered control surfaces and even ailerons, but he did not incorporate them into his designs.

Only his type 18 glider had a rectanguar inner wing which could be pulled close using a scissor link spar. However, with the bigger wing his weight shifting control showed its limits, as this did not lend itself to controlling gliders with bigger wingspans.

Another limit was his insistence that his aircraft would not need a runway or a launching device. Instead, he would grab handles in the Gestellkreuz, stand upright and use his legs as a landing gear. This limited not only the size, but also the wing loading of his designs.

The Wrigths, on the other hand, strived for the mechanically simplest and most lightweight designs and arrived at a biplane of constant chord and much higher aspect ratio. The 1902 glider could already be flown in a prone position and the pilot could control it with control surfaces.



Drag area of the human body in different poses, from Sieghart Hoerner's Fluid Dynamic Drag. The pilot of the Wright flyer caused only one fifth of the drag of the pilot in Lilienthal's designs.

Because the wingspan of the Wright glider was much higher (9.6 m versus 6.7 m for Lilienthal's Normalsegelapparat) and the much higher drag of the pilot's position in case of the Lilienthal design, the Wright glider certainly had a much better glide ratio.