On May 15, 9:00*am, Gregg Ballou wrote:
My WAG would be about 5-6 thousand. *Defining active is tricky,
say at least one flight per year as PIC or actively training. * Iirc
there are about 5k gliders in the US, some shared some parked
indefinitely. *Why not ask the SSA to add 'how many glider
flights last year' question to their renewal form. *Getting a list of
SSA members and checking it against a list of glider owners you
could get an idea of likely active non SSA members. *

A little insight here. The FAA civil airman statistics office has a
newish director, following a 14 year run by her predecessor. Back in
2002, glider ratings sans medical were finally counted. The
'sanitized' 2008 year-end numbers have only now been posted on the FAA
web site and list 29,214 Estimated Active Glider Pilots. This varies
only slightly from the 29,192 ratings I reported to John Roake in
January (for the World Gliding Report) based on the January public
releasable database. This is much closer than prior years, which
differed by 500 to 1000 between what's available in January and what's
published in May.

New pilots have had the option of withholding their social security
numbers when applying for a student certificate and when achieving a
rating for some time now. This will make it increasingly difficult
(by their own admission) for the FAA to reconcile their records with
the SSA (Social Security Admin) should a pilot expire. Several
expired pilots are always in the publicly releasable database. The
monthly publicly releasable pilot database does not include those
pilots who've requested to restrict release of their contact
information. By name and rating, they are still listed in the online
search. As pilots are moving from the paper to plastic certificates,
they are also given the opt-out option again from the public release
of their contact information. Some have been checking this, some
without realizing they've done so. I've asked. The FAA says 7% of all
rated pilots have opted for non-release. When asking for the total
number of glider ratings on the fly, the FAA reports back about
37,000, but clearly this differs from the year end reports because it
also includes foreign addresses holding US glider ratings. That
number is approximately 7900 and also available from the FAA in a
releasable format.

This says nothing of actual activity. The COBM response was that
operational stats are unlikely to be forthcoming from commercial
operators. That may be based on markets where there are commercial
options for pilots. At least one SSA region doesn't have a single
commercial operator, with chapters providing both public and member
services. Other commercial operators are perhaps a bit more exclusive
on the actual type and level of training they'll provide, as Bill
Daniels discovered. So the information may be considered proprietary
by some number of commercial operators. Chapter numbers are also a
bit difficult to come by as 2/3 of the clubs and chapters are not very
forthcoming with information of any sort, let alone operational
statistics. Then there are about a dozen clubs that don't have an SSA
affiliation as an entity and an unknown number of commercial
operations. So, unlike countries that do have authoritative oversight
of their soaring groups, we have to rely of the voluntary interest and
submission of such data.

That said, there are approaches we might consider to really start
collecting such data (anonymously perhaps) as a voluntary, non-profit,
member and member-services organization and doing so with chapter and
business member enhancements and not burdening the operators. Happy
to discuss this elsewhere and I highly encourage you and other SSA
members consider volunteering with a committee of interest.

Very best regards,

Frank Whiteley
Chair, SSA State Governors and Record Keepers Committee
SSA Clubs & Chapters Committee
SSA Growth & Development Committee
SSA Growth Task Force
SSA Governor, Colorado
www.coloradosoaring.org
970-330-2050