On Tuesday, November 20, 2012 9:42:32 AM UTC-5, wrote:


Please sign the petition IF YOU are interested in supporting or flying US Club Class under FAI (IGC) rules / tasking philosophy.


Been "enjoying" the witty banter back and forth on this one but staying out of the fray...until now.

It strikes me that this whole debate is taking us in a direction that, quite frankly, is pretty much irrelevant. Those of us who truly love sailplane racing and are committed to the sport should have one and only one primary objective, and that is growing the number of participants. Do we really believe that the specific rule set we fly under is a major factor in whether people do or don't show up for races? I sure don't.

While opinions are nice, some hard data is better. This past summer, I went to the effort to create a formal survey that tried to get to the bottom of participation in contests. The survey was aimed at the pilots in eastern Region II and Region I (those who fly in the Governor's Cup area that I've been watching over for the last 15 years) who own or co-own a glider (there are a few folks who might be able to wrangle a club ship for a competition, but selected group is easier to isolate). I managed to track down the owners of about 80% of the sailplanes registered in this area and got those owners to participate in the survey - no mean feat! With 65 responses, it covered about 75% of the available fleet in our area, ie. a very significant majority.

The numbers that matter:

- 68% (44) of the respondents routinely fly more than 50KM from home base (i.e. cross country)
- 51% (32) of the respondents routinely post flights to either the OLC or the Governor's Cup (our local version of the OLC with team and individual points)
- 52% (33) of the respondents have participated in one or more SSA Regional or National competitions in the last three years.

Take a minute to absorb this. Basically, a fairly significant number already compete in some form of SSA contest. There are a decent number (11 or 12) who fly XC but don't compete in anything. This is obviously the most attractive group to target.

I then asked those who hadn't competed in a regionals or nationals to rank the reasons for non-participation from 8 defined reasons plus a 9th "other" reason. The three LEAST important inhibitors we

- Panel and instruments not competitive (i.e. flight computer and other geewhiz gadgetry)
- Glider not competitive
- Rules complexity

So, the issues we are fighting over (rules and glider competitiveness) are among the two least important issues to the people we really need to reach , in particular those who fly XC but don't race. It's prety clear that if we switched to an FAI Rules set and a constrained list of ships, we wouldn't suddenly find 10 or 15 LS4s or Discus B's that would come out of the woodwork to join our nationals or super-regional Club Class contests. All we would be doing is to re-shuffle the existing participation and maybe lose a few folks in the process.

In case you were wondering, the top 3 reasons cited for not attending a regionals or nationals we

- Time
- Skills (not comfortable going XC in a racing format)
- Other (more when I get to it)

We'd all be much better served by focusing on how we could build excitement and interest in sailplane racing through a progressive training program, more local contests, and other efforts of that sort rather than bludgeoning the Rules Committe with a petition that is entirely one sided by definition..

I think I'll go sand wings or something...

Erik Mann P3
LS8-18 (formerly club class LS4)