(Mark James Boyd) wrote
The number of days and locations an XC is possible is reduced with
less capable equipment. I got my license in two months, then did a dozen
cross-countries in the following six months, in a 32:1 ship.
I also did two cross-countries in a 1-26, but would have avoided a landout
if I had been in the 32:1 sailplane.

But what's the big deal about landing out in a 1-26? I can't think of
a better ship to have your first landout in. Short wings, very low
touchdown speed, very light, and if you do ding it cheap to fix. You
see it as a bug, I see it as a feature. I wish I had been allowed to
go XC in the club 1-26.

Better equipment means one can fly further on more days with
less experience.

Sure, but the point is that even if all a club has is 1-26 class
ships, that's still no reason to make XC difficult.

I still don't know if I'd go as far as requiring it by regulation,
but I can see it does provide a marketing advantage to my
club to make X-C easier and to provide X-C training.

Sure, to someone who already has a reasonable understanding of the
sport. If I moved to your area, I would of course choose your club.
How would you explain this to someone who has never flown?

Perhaps
the baby steps of a "mini-XC" involving a flight to
an airport 5-10 miles away, to keep costs down.

I never really intended that XC mean 50 nm. That's a big bite for a
first time. As long as you need to make at least 3 climbs to make the
destination and spend at least some time out of glide range of both
home and destination, that's plenty good enough. For a 1-26 with low
cloudbase, that might only be 5-10 miles.

Do you realize that there are not only private glider pilots but even
CFIG's who have never:
(1) Intentionally flown outside gliding range of home base.
(2) Disassembled a glider, put it on a trailer, towed it somewhere,
and reassembled it.
(3) Done an aero retrieve

Personally, I think these are all things that ought to be done at the
private level, lest we produce graduates incapable of anything other
than local flying. If it were up to me, the first XC would be dual,
and terminate with an aero retrieve (also dual), taking off without a
wing runner. The second would be solo and would terminate with a
ground retrieve. Simply include a CFIG or BGI/AGI in the retrieve
crew, and he can asess the student's competence.

The beauty of doing it this way is that both aero retrieves from
airports and ground retrieves would become normal, accepted things,
not some mysterious process that only a few are privileged to
participate in. If students could do it, it would become politically
impossible to deny the privilege to private pilots.

In reality, the cost is minimal. Most instructors are volunteers
anyway, and students can crew for each other. In fact, you can simply
make participation on a ground retrieve (or three) a prerequisite for
flying your solo XC. Now we're just talking gas money.

But this won't happen unless you mandate the XC - too many clubs and
FBO's will not do it.

The recreational license was killed by the insurance industry.
Call them up and see the difference in rates. Many (but
not all) FBO's also require a PPL for rental of some or all
aircraft.

I have yet to see an FBO that would not rent a C-150 class airplane to
a recreational ticket holder. Of course they won't rent the high
performance or complex airplanes to one - he can't legally fly them.
The recreational was killed because the major cost of the training is
the aircraft, not the instructor. So you save a few hours of dual -
so what? You're going to fly those hours anyway.

61.1(3) definition of X-C for gliders isn't published. Perhaps
adding an X-C requirement and simply having it be
"landing at a location or airport which was not the airport
of departure" might work.

A rotorcraft XC need only be 25 nm. Honestly, for gliders I would be
happy with 25 km. An airport 3 miles away that can be reached from
overhead the field on final glide doesn't cut it.

Even with a 1-26, a 25 km downwind dash should be well within the
reach of almost any student.

And this would test some good
basics on a dual flight...use of compass, pattern entry,
wind direction, judging new altitude, etc...

Navigation, finding airports from the air...
Skills that are clearly not being taught, and whose lack is being
covered up by GPS. The situation is so bad that I know a pilot who
landed out on a RECORD flight due to failure of the GPS. Plenty of
lift, and by all accounts the pilot flew over the destination airport
more than once and still failed to find it.

When I took off on glider XC for the first time, I relied almost
exclusively on my powered XC training. At the time, I assumed that I
had never been taught even the rudiments of navigation because my
instructors (correctly) assumed that I already knew how to navigate.
It was only later that I discovered that the ab initio students got no
more navigation training than I did.

The sport-pilot initiative is the opposite of your
idea, applied to power and gliders.

The sport pilot initiative is meaningless. The reduced training
requirement will not affect participation.

I have two CFIs who will quickly and eagerly add a "sport-CFI-glider"
endorsement with two signatures if SP goes through. They will not,
on the other hand, get a CFIG.

Good lord - why not? For any reasonably proficient glider pilot, it's
an absolutely trivial process. I just recently trained a power CFI
for the commercial glider and CFIG. This pilot was trained outside
the US (so was not familiar with our way of doing things), he had not
flown a glider in years, he had never flown the make and model glider
we were using or any other metal glider, and he was not very
experienced in gliders (well under 100 hours). Everything (including
the checkride with a local DE) was done in under 10 flights. The DE
even did both checkrides back-to-back, on the same day. I have to ask
- what are these guys thinking?

Michael