On 16/04/2016 8:19 AM, Mike Borgelt wrote:
At present GFA is setting up a system that burdens private citizens with unnecessary work and responsibility and nobody seems to be looking ahead to see if all this will be sustainable in 10 years. It is a potential time bomb for the sport..
On this, you and I are on the opposite ends of the spectrum. The whole reason I'm getting involved in this is to get the government out of the sport as much as possible. The more we can show that we have our ducks in a row to show we are responsible people (including paying heed to the fact that laws do exist and we must sometimes at least have look like we are obeying them), the less likely we'll have a repeat of a few years ago where we had our entire airworthiness and training system yanked from under us. The subsequent result is having to pay tens of thousands of dollars a year just to maintain our existing fleet - which will drive almost every club into financial ruin and kill the sport completely in this country.
Our old approach was extremely poor, and others called us on it. Really - we keep all our airworthiness records in some guy's personal garage that then burnt down?! That's beyond amateurish and CASA should take us to task on that because internally nobody bothered. Yearning for "the good ole days" won't make our lives better or give us more freedom.
Besides, once again, you think "court of law" means The Government coming after us. Very narrow minded there. There's many other ways we can end up in that situation that doesn't involve the government - even if we gave away all our delegations and made CASA look after us completely.
On the aging community, I do agree there. We have a problem. My club, at least, is doing a lot to address that. Currently I believe about 20% of our membership is under 25. Maybe half of those guys are coming along with me on the airworthiness trek, and I have another half a dozen "older" members (most under 45 too) as well that will be looking to complete their Form 2 training within the next year or so. SXGC has historically been a feeder club to the rest of NSW - most of our members eventually leave and join more cross country-oriented clubs. Considering ours is a club where historically the entire fleet has been maintained by a commercial shop and I've got it to this stage in 3 years, I think we're doing darn well at addressing that concern about the aging community and airworthiness.
We have a choice: we can either sit back in our rocking chairs on the porch and complain about it, or get off our arses and make sure the rules get bent in a way that works for our benefit rather than having rules imposed on us that we don't like. I'm in the second camp.
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