Thank you all for the delightful conversation at ‘GFA negative advertising……'
I thought I’d start fresh, on some items that move away from that thread above. It surprises me that the ‘but you are bashing the GFA’ legion didn’t pipe up. Perhaps it was because GFA are bashing themselves up in their Pravda list. There are diverse views across the glider pilot nation about what GFA is: - Some see GFA as being the whole of ’the sport'. - Some see GFA as an administrative benefit or necessity to the sport - Some (me) see this 67 year old organisation as having had its day and now being in its own generated death throes. For all the reasons already enunciated by others - self destructive, dictatorial, creating silos of irrelevant hierarchal positions which will never be filled because there aren’t enough volunteers left, and so on. The biggest hurdle for GFA is the loss within itself in its corporate knowledge - all the current incumbents came into a fully formed sport and try to re-imagine it in their own image without a skeric of understanding of how things came to be. (e.g. they don’t know what ‘the Valentine Curve’ is) ‘Those who don’t know their history are bound to repeat it’. With the benefit of longevity and a curiosity to track things (yes, I am the dude who did the quantitative measuring of successful and defunct clubs for the whole of Australia in the 1970s) I advise - - In 1949 the GFA was formed to be the barrier between glider pilots and ‘the Department’ - where glider pilots said ‘WE are the people who know how gliders work, they are not power planes, so we set rules appropriate to us - helped by the proposition (a la ‘The Castle’) that the Australian Constitution does not regulate aviation (which didn’t exist when it was first written), hence aviation is regulated federally only by the consensus of the aviation community - That original bottom up driven model of regulation of the sport by the sport, in the best examples of participatory democracy, lasted until 1981 - By then the sport had grown to 100 clubs, about 5000 pilots, and enthusiasm and volunteer inputs to ‘our sport’ which got it there and was propelling it even higher - So GFA has never been ‘the sport’, it has always been the external peripheral administrative element that we ‘needed to have’, and was thus always kept as small as possible. - So in 1981 the world changed, yes Richard, you are right. The system was re-written and has been re-written several more times since, by incumbents of their day who saw a great sport, and thought re-imagining it in their own image would both serve the sport and themselves well. - So gliding the sport declined to 2000 pilots in 50 or so clubs, with the unstated direction being the demise of the small clubs (less than 20 members), leaving commercial servicing, schools and big clubs. We are indeed on track in that direction. The barriers to achieving the goals of that objective (a more ‘professional' sport) is that it is being pressed onto the old model of volunteer cadre to achieve. And people not being stupid, say things (as per the previous thread) ‘ ‘why would I work at making my kind of gliding fail or be inaccessible?’, and stuff like that. Gliding is not a franchise that GFA owns. So people choose to bale out when the onerous impositions exceed the benefit to them, assessed against their definition of ‘the sport’. With many then going to other sport aviation; a barrier to hoped-for flow the other way. (Their tales of woe unimpress aviators from other sport) GFA does not control gliding, despite continuous threats and intimidation issued by it/them. Glider pilots agree to follow rules that make sense because these keep us alive. GFA is overlaying this with rules addressing ‘fear of litigation’ against themselves, to be shifted onto the volunteers. The current conversation, either in its form today or some future time, will result in the demise of the GFA. Glider pilots will find their own way to fly the kind of sport each group within the sport wants. GFA doesn’t have the budget to follow through the promotion and support to create the sport in their image. All the attempts so far (since 1981 to date) have thoroughly failed as noted above, and will continue to fail. Pilots and clubs (particularly the small ones) are right now debating internally what sort of sport they want. Paying lip service to ‘the authority’ and getting on with flying safely is a reality since 1924 (the oldest glider I have in my 2 dozen collection). Some pilots and clubs will decide to be ‘mucking about in boats’ style volunteering, and will attract like minded people. Some pilots and clubs will go ‘hire & fly’ with commercial support; and ditto. And all the other variants between. And really few pilots will aspire to the GFA view of itself. Welcome to the real world folks. Emilis (turn rant mode off) _______________________________________________ Aus-soaring mailing list [email protected] http://lists.base64.com.au/listinfo/aus-soaring
