Schmutzhart had already built one glider when he lived in his native Austria. When he moved to the United States in 1958 he decided to design and build a new glider, but was constrained by the dimensions of his small Washington, DC townhouse. As a result, he built a small aircraft that still achieved good performance for its size.
The SCH-1 has a 441NaN1 wingspan and employs a Nickel 17% airfoil, with flaps for glidepath control. The flaps can be set to 0, +4, +45 and +70 °. The basic structure of the SCH-1 is aluminium with some fiberglass fairings. The leading edge wing ribs are made from dense Styrofoam cut with a bandsaw, with the ribs aft of the spar fabricated from cold-formed sheet aluminum. The fuselage was constructed by bending the outside skin onto a jig and then riveting the bulkheads and stringers to the skin from the inside. The wings were built in a similar manner in a jig that held the wing skins, with the ribs then fitted to the skins. Schmutzhart says that the wing skins were formed by being "pressed between the floor, a long board, two lawyers, one architect, a federal bureaucrat and a White House aid". The wing spar is a 6061-T6 aluminum milled I-beam, with the outer spar sections built up from bent flat aluminum stock. The aircraft was originally fitted with an all-flying tail, but this was later modified to a conventional tailplane and elevator.[4]
The aircraft is registered with the Federal Aviation Administration in the Experimental - Amateur-Built category. Only one SCH-1 was built.
In June 2011 the SCH-1 was still registered to Schmutzhart, some 34 years after its completion.