Why is Soaring declining

At 14:42 27 April 2004, Eric Greenwell wrote:
Michael wrote:
Eric Greenwell wrote

Think for a moment. If you're checking yourself out
in a glider,
you're going to do some stalls in it, right? And
they're going to be
true approach-to-landing stalls - starting with a
stabilized descent
at pattern speed, with a speed reduction to mimic
the flare. Gives
you plenty of time to feel what the glider is going
to do.

Suppose we didn't teach stalls that way. Suppose
we taught them as a
performance maneuver, where the goal was to get the
nose high, get a
clean break, and minimize altitude loss at recovery.
Would the
student still be prepared to figure out the landing
characteristics of
the plane?

If we taught them this way, we would be doing the student
a disservice,
even if they never flew any other glider. It's widely
understood that
you have to teach turning stalls, as these are the
most likely way a
pilot will encounter a spin or spiral dive.


They must be taught BOTH ways!



Apparently, I'm still missing the point: why is a 1-26
or ka-8 far better for soaring flight?

These are good reasons to have a glider that is easier
to retrieve from
a field, but aren't related to the soaring or cross-country
ability of
the glider.

As a general rule, it makes sense to consider the practicality
of de-rigging in a plowed field, because one day you
will have to do it. I've learned the hard way that
X/C flying is more than just flying X/C. Modern, easy
to load and unload trailers make X/C flight much less
painless than the old trailers of twenty years ago.
Two hours of rigging and de-rigging is much more discouraging
than twenty to thirty minutes on either end of a flight.
An excellent trailer might just be be most important
factor in encouraging frequent X/C flying.