If a person wanted to learn to fly gliders and was offered a K13, ASK21, Blanik etc and was told this will take months and months if not years, you will spend all day the the gliding club and get maybe 3 15 to 20 minute flights and be pushing gliders around or retrieving them from the far end of the strip when students misjudge while learning to land and there was a 98% chance that you would NEVER become a competent glider pilot because you would leave the sport out of frustration after having spent heaps of time and money at an organisation not properly set up or dedicated to flying training or offered a Jabiru (poverty pack model under A$70,000 ex factory and perfectly adequate for basic flying training) and 50 hours flying during which only you and the instructor need show up and you would be competent to take off and land, fly around, do visual and GPS cross country navigation, do field selection and generally develop airmanship followed by a gliding conversion of a dozen or so aerotows and a few hours learning thermalling and some short cross country flights in a high performance glider like a Duo,which do you think the person would choose?
I think I agree that the time, effort and commitment required compared to amount of flying received is a significant discouragement to take up gliding with the 'modern' way of life in Australia. Unfortunately, our club's experience is that after training in the Jabiru, the trainee doesn't have any interest in converting to the glider (I'm the only one in our club who did). Perhaps the Blanik is not attractive enough, but I think it mostly comes back to the time& effort required which few people want to commit to these days. Perhaps (well-performing) motor-gliders are the way of the future for gliding. The club structure and 'expected' volunteer input also appears to be off-putting to many. It can be hard to find volunteers for the committee with enough spare time to help, then there's aircraft maintenance and working bees... Kym Z. -- ------------------------- www.riverland.net.au/~kym ------------------------- _______________________________________________ Aus-soaring mailing list [email protected] To check or change subscription details, visit: http://lists.internode.on.net/mailman/listinfo/aus-soaring
