Mark, Thanks for livening up the debate :)
I'll make just a few comments to some specific sentences in your mail. I appreciate that I'm taking them out of context and so this may not be entirely fair. I also want you to appreciate that I'm being a devils' advocate here, not trying to level anything toward you personally. Your points are appropriately contentious and they deserve a contentious reply to test them against the current state of play in the world :) At 9:13 AM +0930 19/6/02, Mark Newton wrote: >If I don't want to use a club's aircraft, >I don't need anything to do with a club, thanks. If you own a self-launcher, are prepared to fly it at Parafield airport, and you don't mind having no social interaction with the people who taught you to fly, the above might be true. However, the above is likely to inhibit your flying if you were expecting access at a gliding club to any or all of: - The club winch or tow aircraft - The free labour of other club members - Club facilities of any sort - (where owned by the club) the airfield itself. - The friendship of the people who taught you to fly. Some people don't care about the above. Some people do. Therein lies the crux of the matter, in some senses. In more detail: I'm just trying to point out that this utopian world, where the club never gets in your way, may ignore: - The feelings of other club members, including instructors, if their voluntary services are used without sufficient respect and/or recompense (including contributions in terms of labour and in-kind to the people who gave you the opportunity to learn to fly so cheaply in the first place) - The liability issues of the current system, *in its current state* (think of how much trepidation must go into a club instructors' panel decision to award an L2 Ind-Op rating today - what if that pilot dies while using it tomorrow?). I suspect that instructors' panels would PREFER that someone else other than them assigned you the right to fly independently, but you should then expect to take, and pass, an independent flight competency test, regularly, at your expense. That might not be a problem for you, but some others might prefer the option to have the club keep doing internal certification of fitness to fly. - The fact that a pilots' freedom to fly may be quite reasonably impacted by -where- he chooses to do it. If he chooses to do it on an airfield owned by someone else, operated by someone else, then (like all the times when we step on to privately held land) we need to respect the rules imposed by the owner of the facility that we are choosing to use, lest we be run out of town as a trespasser with no respect. Consider that when you ask (or worse, expect) that club to offer you the use of its glider tug, you do need to be aware that in doing so, you are expecting others to work for you - and they may have expectations upon you in return, in excess of the 'theoretical' rules (like a duty instructor wanting to check-fly you first, whatever your magic book says), and if you don't like them, then don't expect to use their tug, or their tug pilots' labour. In that respect, the 'bugger you, I have the right' attitude cuts both ways. They, equally, have the right to tell you that you can't use their tug if they don't feel like it, because its their tug, not yours - just like its your glider rating, not theirs. This cuts to the heart of some aspects of this debate, of course. And it isn't surprising, really, in the light of all of this, that the majority of new gliders are built as self-launchers. It is probably correlated to this shift in the world, where we no longer need to depend on a club for our -ability- (not right, -ability-) to commit aviation any more, in a world that has self launching gliders in it. Thus, the presence of self-launching gliders in great number is probably one of the main factors that is acting to shake up the old notions of how club based systems operate - because it provides that -ability- for people to decide to say 'stuff the club, I wanna go flying anyway'. A few decades ago that wasn't really an option for most glider pilots. Now it is. ... And the fragmentation of the very things that created the gliding movement originally continues to happen apace. In the words of my favourite science fiction author, 'Just call it evolution in action'. I hope we all like the creature that we're evolving into. I'm in two minds about that, as you would expect for someone who is living through (and contributing to) that transition (as the owner of a self-launching motor glider). I am also a member of a very small winch based club where flying still happens because (and only because) enough people are prepared to help each other to make it happen - which has nothing, really, to do with the GFA, nothing to do with 'its my bloody right to fly'. Its the good old fashioned notion of a club being the way that people can help each other to enrich each others' lives, with flying being an intentional side effect. I'll leave you with this thought: AOPA, love them or hate them, are the proponents of a phrase which I think does very aptly frame what Mark is talking about in general, and which I agree with: "The Freedom To Fly Responsibly". I like that phrase a lot. I think it embodies most of what most of us care about in this context. That phrase means different things to different people. It may be worth bearing that phrase in mind when you consider any and all changes to our systemic structures. Do those changes enhance, or impede, our freedom to fly responsibly? Frankly, I don't know. Cheers, Simon -- Simon Hackett, Technical Director, Internode Systems Pty Ltd 31 York St [PO Box 284, Rundle Mall], Adelaide, SA 5000 Australia Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web: http://www.internode.on.net Phone: +61-8-8223-2999 Fax: +61-8-8223-1777 -- * 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.
