On 12 Nov 2003 16:40:39 -0800, (Craig
Freeman) wrote:

OK Andreas and Janusz I just gotta know where does the scratch, dough,
frogskins, moolah, change, MONEY come from to purchase all this really,
really nice soaring equipment? Somehow clubs in the Good Ole US of A
don't seem so well stocked with soaring inventory even though by your
standards the dues are outrageously high. Are we comparing apples to
apples here?

Good question, Craig.

First of all, we have no professional staff - anything is done on
voluntary basis. Each active member has a schedule of several weekend
duties per year (winch driver, kitchen, instructor, tow pilot, and so
on) and in the winter the active members do ALL the maintenance of
aircraft, club hous and airfield. This is the main advantage of a club
- it saves a lot of money each year. It helps that we have relatively
many active pilots (85 at the moment including student pilots) -
usually between 20 and 30 pilots are there on a given day.

The advantage of this system is clear I guess - on the other hand, you
cannot schedule a flight for a certain time. An active pilot needs to
stay on the airfield for a major part of the day (at least), and
usually has to share a glider with two to three comrades per day.

Plenty of flying is done during the week where you have a glider for
yourself. This is usually cross-country flying, instructing is only
done by scheduled instructors on the weekend (of course, if you find a
willing instructor, you can have an appointment with him anytime).

Very important was the fact that we've been flying on a military
(French Army) training terrain for which we had to pay nearly no rent.


Since 40 years my club has always tried to buy as modern gliders as
possible (the idea was/is to have at least one top-performance glider
for our competition pilots). If you buy a new glider in Germany, you
get significant tax abatements (in the range of 20 percent iirc), and
we usually kept the glider for about 10-14 years. So far we were
always able to sell the glider for more money than we had to pay for
it when it was new (In case of your G-103 Twin 2, we even earned
18.000 DM more when we sold it for 60.000 DM after 13 years in 1995
-we bought it for 42.000 DM, unfortunately the DG-505 to replace it
cost 130.000), and the purchase of the next (new) glider) cost us only
an additional charge minus tax abatement. This system has been working
very well in the past, but the latest generation of gliders (e.g.
ASW-27) is that much more expensive than its predecessor generation
(ASW-20) that this system is probably not going to work anymore in the
future.

At the moment we have an order for a Duo Discus that is going to
complement our fleet (we need more seats since the club has grown a
lot in the recent 15 years - from 55 to 85 active pilots), but we are
not sure yet if we will be able to pay it (we are still paying back
150.000 EUR for our part of the airfield that we bought in 1999). We
could get the AS-22-2 (ASH-25 prototype) for less than half the price
of the new Duo, but so far we are not sure yet what to do.


On the other hand - these days gliders don't wear out anymore. If
necessary, a re-finishing (we are doing this by ourselves) is cheap
(but lots of work) and then the glider is as new again, so it's likely
that gliders will be kept for a longer time (15-17 years at least) in
the future.

Until now if you needed a glider for a competition/training
course/vacation, you did not have to pay for it - all you needed was
to ask the executive board and show some above-average dedication.


The gliders were usually financed by members' loans (members loan the
money, get a little more interest than they'd get on their check
account, yet this interest is a lot lower than the usual bank's
interest for a credit). On the long run this system has proved to be a
lot more effective than saving the money till it's enough to buy a
glider.

Other incomes of the club are rare - few contributions, a little
excess of competitions we hold. Winch, tow plane and club house are
calculated that they pay their own costs, we don't earn money with
them).

Intersting note:
Until perhaps five, six years ago privately owned gliders were
forbidden in my club. We had the fear that members with a private
glider would dedicate their time rather on their own means than
working for the club. These days we have half a dozen of privately
owned gliders, and most of their owners still work very well for the
club, so I expect that we are going to see more privately owned
gliders in the future.


One important factor is the payment: We have a flat rate for (winch
launched) flying. This flat rate of about 255 EUR covers all the costs
for winch launching and flying time. The benefit is simple: It does
not matter if you are doing one launch or ten, if you fly ten minutes
or 5 hours. Fly as often as you like (as the others let you... lol).

This leads to the fact that there's alwas plenty of activity on the
airfield, even if the weather is not exhilarating. And in the
beginning of the year it's already clear how much money is going to be
earned over the year - bad weather (with little flying) will not
result in a loss of income for the club. A safe base for calculations.

Our primary launch system, the winch, is very cheap to operate and
very reliable, so it doesn't matter if our tow plane, the Robin
Remorqeur, is grounded for a week because of maintenance (we do this
by ourselves - takes longer, but costs nearly nothing).

All our gliders have a full physical damage insurance.



These are some basics.
I guess it's clear that the basis of a successful club is one thing -
companionship.
To us this is so important that we express this in the club's name:

DJK-SegelflugGEMEINSCHAFT Landau.
http://www.djk-landau.de





Bye
Andreas