On Jan 23, 4:28*pm, ZL wrote:
wrote:
On Jan 23, 1:46 pm, toad wrote:
I think that the decline in contest flying has NOTHING to do with the
racing rules ! *And no tinkering or restraint from tinkering will
change that decline.

It is simply mirroring the decline of soaring in general.

Todd Smith
3S

You may be right, although my impression is that neither soaring in
general nor the SSA membership specifically has suffered a 14%+
decline in the past four years.

snip

Here's some slightly different stats over previous years. The US
Competition Pilot Ranking list. Including some way back, pre-GPS, early
sports class years I found in my files. It gives the total number of
pilots that scored in an SSA sanctioned over the previous 3 years.
Smooths out some of the outlying good and bad years.

1990 - *620
1992 - *630
1995 - *550
2001 - *501
2002 - *551
2003 - *619*
2004 - *636
2005 - *636
2006 - *590
2007 - *592
2008 - *594

* The online list shows 900, hand removing obvious duplicates gives 619

Looks to me like the 20 year trend is remarkably flat. Bigger percentage
of SSA members today, but maybe not a different percentage of total
active glider pilots.

-Dave
ZL

In addition to the above, we have to also admit that non-sanctioned
local contests which didn't even exist on a large scale 15 years ago
are a legitimate form of racing which is growing. As ZA points out
in another post, the Chicago area racing scene is alive and well.
Same with the Governor's Cup in the PA/NY/NJ and the GTA races. I
did a quick back-of-the-envelope look at these three racing series
alone and came up with well over 50 pilots who do compete - just not
in SSA Sanctioned events. So, if I use even the conservative
number of 50 and add that to the numbers from the last 10 years or so
(when most of these series got going), you would conclude that, if
anything, there's been a slight increase in racing participation since
the early 1990s. Given the overall decline in the number of SSA
members, one could see reason for taking an optimistic view.

None of this suggests we can afford to be complacent, but I think "the
reports of racing's death are greatly exaggerated. "

P3