< Brief overview - Use simulators more often and more widely across clubs for training purposes >
An aim of the club environment is obviously to increase the appeal of the sport to prospective long term gliding enthusiasts when they are at the 'fragile' ab-initio stage. This entails providing a rich experience for the time that they are within the club environment and in terms of money spent giving them 'good bang for buck' so as to encourage them to come back.
Along with this is the aim of showing the sport as a competently structured organisation capable of providing a safe and interesting environment in which the members can develop and participate.
The discussion relating to attracting younger members to the sport does trigger need to look at what constitutes a valuable day in terms of the new paying customer.
I would hazard a guess that the following would be of interest. I am a sometimes participant not an instructor so apologies for omissions or errors:
1. Flying in a glider
2. Learning how to better control the glider
3. Developing airmanship skills
4. Comfortable club environment
5. Safe environment ( importance grows with age & no. of kids at home )
6. General feeling of money well spent on a days entertainment
7. Feeling of ongoing development by means of some positive form of continuous education ( as opposed to some osmotic reaction at the bar at the end of the day )
Hopefully this translates into a long term case of aviation disease from which the participant never recovers and non-flying spouses never understand ;-)
<< Your mileage may vary on the following >>
A day at the club typically entails spending a lot of time running wings, driving winches & retrieves or sitting about waiting, particularly when the club has a lot of AEF's happening. The former is useful, the latter is frustrating as usually the guys who know anything about anything are away for the day in the single seaters.
The duty instructor is busy as heck and when your time comes to fly you effectively have to stuff everything into the time you are sitting in the cockpit. Later that day there may be an opportunity to discuss the days activities a bit more.
A chunk of cockpit time is spent on procedures and planning ahead for launch failure procedures etc, as it should. At the latter part of the flight the same occurs for the landing phase of the flight.
My suggestion is that more of this training time be expended in the low stress environment of the simulator where the student is likely to be more mentally receptive to the information. The student could be mentored by a person competent in that phase of operations either at the club or during the week at home. This way the time spent actually in the cockpit would be of far greater value & the person would have a higher level of competence & so receptive to more advanced training issues while airborne.
The early training phase can be very frustrating and easily seen as just too hard or too drawn out, particularly for us impatient types. That translates to lost members.
I have stood listening to people running thru cable break procedures who have trouble saying them in a reasonable time let alone carrying out the activity mid launch. Hammering procedures in believable scenarios on the ground in the sim would in my opinion assist in increasing competence and confidence.
Sims are cheap to set up and provide another avenue for flying related entertainment to keep young enthusiastic minds busy when there are no wings to run & no aircraft to fly. Later, the platform provides a means of discussing cross-country tactics in a comfortable environment while illustrating the effects on the sim.
Mating training text to canned sim scenarios would provide a more consistent training ccurriculum for all clubs. Particularly those that don't have good access to a broad range of instructors and gun competition pilots. The cost of a sim is low in comparison to the cost of training so individuals would likely invest in the software in order to improve their skills to get better value out of the time spent at the field. In order for this to work correctly they will need tutoring at the club level to ensure that they are not just reinforcing bad habits.
Besides watching someone trying to do a 500K in Germany at 10pm when full of beer can be entertaining too...
-- Cheers
Don Ingram _______________________________________________ Aus-soaring mailing list Aus-soaring@lists.internode.on.net To check or change subscription details, visit: http://lists.internode.on.net/mailman/listinfo/aus-soaring
