Why is Soaring declining

All it takes to get a Soaring Mag in the barbers chair
is to take one you are finished with and drop it in
there. I drop them at the doctors office and in the
university library. Also if someone feels they are
not willing to join the SSA to read the mag and want
to check it out, just drop me an email and I will send
you a couple of issues that are a month or two old.
I am sure a lot of other guys would be willing to pass
theirs on as well. Like a lot of guys I collected them
for about 25 years until I realized I would never read
most of them again. jeffAt 02:54 15 April 2004, Bill Daniels wrote:Eric presents a reasonable picture of the glider market.
In fact, I thinkthe present glider market is about right. There is
a market forstate-of-the-art gliders for competition and a flourishing
market in usedgliders.A person of modest means can buy a 20 year old glass
glider with spectacularperformance. That 20 year old glider wouldn't be such
a bargain on the usedmarket if some competition pilot hadn't bought it for
an astronomical sumwhen it was new. We need to stop knocking competition,
it creates a marketof really neat used gliders. When I started, if you
wanted a highperformance glider, you had to build it. By comparison,
this market isnirvana. The availability and cost of gliders isn't
the real problem.One of the many problems that does need attention is
training costs. Rentaland airtow make getting a glider rating cost more than
a private powercertificate in many locations. It's also a LOT more
hassle to get glidertraining because of the short flights and long waits.
For anyone interestedin aviation but who hasn't chosen whether to go for
soaring or anotheraviation related activity, this is a problem. Glider
training costs,particularly the overall hourly rates, just don't look
reasonable bycomparison.Now, I'm NOT suggesting that anyone is overcharging
for rentals or air tows.It costs what is does for very good reasons. It's
just that those reasonsare not apparent to the newcomer.I think it might be a good idea to take a long hard
look at the training'experience' from the students point of view to see
if there isn't somethingthat could be done to make it more attractive. The
first thing I wouldsuggest is to look at winch launch for training.Bill Daniels'Eric Greenwell' wrote in ... Lennie the Lurker wrote: Almost every sailplane made today is made with the competitor in mind, and the manufacturers aren't
going to listen to any suggestion that maybe something more pedestrian
might sell. There is some truth to this claim, but it's more complicated
than the manufacturers 'not listening'. They know their gliders
must do well in competition (at least the major factories), because
potential buyers think this is important, even though the majority
of buyers aren't serious competitors (note that the majority of the
German sailplane production is now motorized). There are some 'second-tier' gliders, like the reintroduction
of the Glasflugel 304, the Russia AC-4, Apis, and Silent;
however, any new glider that isn't a top-of-the-line glider has some
serious competition in the market: used gliders. Glider last a long time,
and the performance improvements have been slow, so a new
glider that isn't better, just cheaper, has to compete with equal performance,
even cheaper used gliders. This situation is quite different from the hang glider
market, where the gliders wear out much sooner, and the improvements
from year to year are much greater than they are for sailplanes. and the manufacturers aren't going to listen to any suggestion that maybe something more pedestrian
might sell. Just join a thread ripping apart the PW5 to see how
something 'more pedestrian' might sell. The PW5 actually has sold
OK, as did the Russia, and so that may be why we now have the Apis and Silent
(at least in part). Attitudes are slowly changing, and 'moderate'
performance is becoming more acceptable. The manufacturers would probably build more intermediate
gliders if the sport was growing fast enough to drive up the price
of the used gliders, thus making a new glider of similar performance profitable
enough to be worthwhile. -- ----- change 'netto' to 'net' to email me directly Eric Greenwell Washington State USA

All it takes to get a Soaring Mag in the barbers chair
is to take one you are finished with and drop it in
there. I drop them at the doctors office and in the
university library.

Yes, and many libraries will add subscriptions on request. SSA even has a
special subscriber only price for this.