From: Kevin Roden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Lucky you Graeme, I agree with your statement "I would like MY OWN CLUB to
continue in existence..."
...snip
So Graeme I hope your club keeps chugging along, I am happy that you have
launching facilities, and don't seem to care that the world is crumbling
around you.
Having just spent a week at Leeton and enjoyed your hospitality, I would be
sad to see the Leeton Club disappear but I think your comment is unfair. I
KNOW how I can help my club continue. I wouldn't have the gall to suggest
that I have any idea what made Leeton decline and I have no idea what I
could have done to stop it. It's not that I don't care, it's that there's
nothing I can usefully DO to help Leeton. If you like I'll wring my hands
and say that the GFA should and could have stopped it. But both of us would
know that's a lie. Leeton's dying because there aren't enough enthusiastic
members and neither you nor I nor the GFA know how to change that.
All I can do to help gliding is do MY level best to keep my OWN club going.
If all of us do that successfully, gliding throughout Australia will
continue. If we concentrate on OUR club NOT failing and we're successful,
gliding will continue and modestly prosper. The clubs and commercial
ventures ARE gliding. All the rest is window dressing.
Bringing it back to this forum, global statistics of glider pilot numbers,
whether accident reports are published, whether the GFA is a
self-perpetuating theocracy all look embarrassingly petty nitpicking in the
face of the failure of a once prosperous club.
I hope other GFA members have a longer term view of gliding clubs for them
to have any hope of surviving.
First - I don't see myself as a GFA member. I set out to fly gliders and
I'm a member of the Club where I do that. Being a member of the GFA just
turned out to be part of the deal. It's not fundamental. Survival of my
own club is.
Second - I take a VERY long term view of gliding clubs and I'm doing my best
to make sure the ONLY ONE whose future I have any influence on will be here
for my grandchildren. Like most things in life, there are no guarantees of
success but failure won't be for lack of trying.
A suggestion. Geoff Kidd lives near Wagga so he's probably a member of
Wagga/Lockhart. That's relatively close to Leeton and he's a very
enthusiastic and energetic bloke. Why not get onto him and see what can be
done to put Leeton's underused facilities together with Wagga's membership
base? It will certainly be more useful in making sure both of you can
continue gliding than the fripperies that have been discussed here.
Graeme Cant
Kevin Roden
Graeme Cant wrote:
From: "Geoff Kidd" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Good stuff.
Can you add the % increase/decrease, for each country, in your
spreadsheet, based on the comparison of the 93 - 04 figures .......... to
see what the various trends are?
I guess he can - but to what purpose?
I really don't care whether gliding in Australia is growing, shrinking or
tying itself in knots. I would like MY OWN CLUB to continue in existence
and it seems to be doing that very nicely, with relatively stable numbers
- perhaps slightly increasing. I've introduced a few friends to gliding
and every now and then other members do and the club chugs along nicely.
I don't care if gliding becomes more popular. It appears it was much more
popular in the late 70s but since it has shrunk from then, that popularity
clearly didn't translate into a better gliding experience for many of the
members - because they left.
It seems to me that if we all try to make sure that our own club stays a
happy, solvent organisation which provides as far as possible an
affordable and enjoyable gliding life for those who wish to be part of it,
then that is the best we can do. Growth will then take care of itself.
By which I mean - it will happen if that is what makes people enjoy
gliding more. And if not, it won't.
The only thing I can do about the state of world gliding is to help keep
my own club viable. That's all you can do too. The rest is gum-beating.
Graeme Cant
_______________________________________________
Aus-soaring mailing list
[email protected]
To check or change subscription details, visit:
http://lists.internode.on.net/mailman/listinfo/aus-soaring
_______________________________________________
Aus-soaring mailing list
[email protected]
To check or change subscription details, visit:
http://lists.internode.on.net/mailman/listinfo/aus-soaring
