On 9 Apr, Mike Borgelt wrote: > Gliding is waning- so is private general aviation which you realise when > you fly across the country and encounter only ONE other aircraft doing the > same thing.
Having recently participated in the QSA Easter comp at Chinchilla, I would have to disagree on this. There was significant enthusiasm visible which will be carrried back to the clubs. I know that those of us from Caboolture who attended have a number of ideas to help our club (and hence the gliding movement) expand further. > Flying training is important to the survival of people we entice into this > activity. I believe the days of well meaning amateurs are over. Are you suggesting that gliding training be conducted only by trained 'professionals'? If so, I think that this would be a great loss to the sport. Whilst there may be (probably are) poor instructors in the system, there are also significant numbers of very good ones - to the ranks of which I aspire. You seem to believe (from earlier posts) that people only become instructors because they want to fly for free. The good instructors I have met both here and in the UK do it for the love of the sport and the huge satisfaction that comes from helping someone to learn the sport they love. Moving to a 'professional' only training regimen will not solve the troubles that you perceive - it will only ensure that a swag of people who love training and are good at it disappear from gliding. I have met some awfully unprofessional 'professionals' in every so called professional field - do you think gliding would be any different? If there are problems in our initial and on-going training of instructors, then we need to fix the training system to eliminate those problems (which may involve disrating some bad instructors). > We are making it too hard to go gliding in many ways and too easy in others. > Cut out the slogging around winches etc but don't tell people gliding is > easy and doesn't take any study of theory etc. It is a highly technical > sport. Funny thing is that there are heaps of people out there with highly > technical orientations - they tend to be busy though and when they go > gliding they want to fly not stand around fly blown, dusty airfields. Again, I contend that this is not the case. 'Pie cart' discussions at Caboolture are frequently technical and wide ranging. At the Chinchilla comp there were several excellent formal lectures given in the evening by skilled and knoweldgeable people. For myself, when I get my instructor rating back I am looking forward to dusting off my aeronautics degree and imparting (and relearning and learning new) appropriate technical information in discussion with my students and fellow instructors. However, I won't be running them through the Navier-Stokes equations or the highly complex PDEs that describe roll rates etc! I think you are suggesting that we are not teaching enough basic theory as part of the basic training we give. Could you be more specific - what are we missing and what are you doing to get it included into the syllabus we teach? > A parting thought - get rid of the piecart! I think you and I are in different universes Mike. I don't believe that the current gliding movement is perfect but what I see at my club and recently at Chinchilla suggests that gliding is reasonably healthy. Yes - we need more young people involved, but that's not going to get fixed by carping about the GFA. It will be fixed by the clubs (in the form of individual members) doing interesting and innovative things to attract young people into the movement. We have several teens at Caboolture and are looking for ways to attract more - as well as attract their parents. -- Robert Hart [EMAIL PROTECTED] Strategic IT & open source consulting +61 (0)438 385 533 Brisbane, Australia http://www.interweft.com.au -- * You are subscribed to the aus-soaring mailing list. * To Unsubscribe: send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] * with "unsubscribe aus-soaring" in the body of the message * or with "help" in the body of the message for more information.
