On Thu, 31 May 2012 16:45:28 -0700, John Halpenny wrote:

Many years ago I belonged to a sailing club with a very active training
program. Training sessions involved crowds of students and instructors
on the dock paired up randomly in a first come, first served format. The
lessons were disorganized but the social life was great. They later went
to a more organized plan with scheduled times and instructors, so there
were far few people hanging about,... and the club collapsed.

We're not collapsing, but I see something similar since my club switched
to bookable training rather than the traditional flying list at the
launch point.

I learned with the list: worked for me, as I got solo in six months of
weekend-only flying. I learnt on the winch in a system that guaranteed at
least two launches each time you got to the top of the queue, and three
if demand was lower. There was generally a reasonable number of people
around the launch point, so ground handling muscle was usually not a
problem and at busy times we had enough helpers to manage almost 20
launches an hour using a dual-drum winch.

Now that almost all training is booked there simply aren't very many
people at the launch point: last Saturday PM I was the only designated
launch point marshal (there are normally two) and so was very busy and
forced to rely on students and those waiting to fly to keep things moving
because nobody else was there to help by retrieving landed gliders,
fetching winch cables, etc, etc. I accept that booked training is
probably better for students, but it wrecks the launch point social scene
and makes life much harder for those running the flight line.


--
martin@ | Martin Gregorie
gregorie. | Essex, UK
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