The Rebell was designed by Gerhard Blessing as a self-launching
glider suitable for amateur builders, even those working in confined workspaces. To allow this, the wing could be built in one, two or three parts and no individual component was more than long. The Rebell had
low-mid set wings built around a single wooden spar and wood covered. They had
dihedral only on the outer panels, each long and foldable for storage. The
fuselage was a steel tube structure, wood covered and had a roughly rectangular cross-section. The
canopy was quite long and normally enclosed just a single seat, but there was space to place a second seat in
tandem behind the first. The engine, originally a
Hirth M28 twin cylinder unit, was placed over the wing behind the
cockpit with the
propeller shaft at the top of the fuselage, locating the
propeller just behind the
trailing edge of the wing. Aft, the fuselage became a low-set boom, bearing wooden tail surfaces including a swept, straight edged vertical tail with a long
dorsal fillet. The Rebell had a recessed
monowheel undercarriage assisted by a tailwheel and two stabilizing wheels mounted at the extreme inner wing panels. The first flight was made on 3 June 1973. In 1974 the Hirth company went into liquidation and an alternative engine was needed; in the Summer of 1975 the Rebell prototype was flying with a modified Volkswagen motor. Further testing in this form led to a major power plant/fuselage rebuild, started in 1976. The result, renamed the
Staff Rebell, had a
tractor configuration Limbach SL1700 engine in the nose. The fuselage, its wooden covering replaced with Dacron, became deeper behind the cockpit and no longer a boom; the dorsal fillet was removed. The canopy was also re-shaped, curving down to rather than merging horizontally into the dorsal line. The Staff Rebell first flew in August 1980. ==Operational history==