Open Discussion; Creating XC pilots

MB,

Thanks for the talk you gave at Reno. It was good and would have really dovetailed well into what Kemp and I were going to talk about with the XC Mentoring that we have done. I agreed that Hugh and Gordo had just done something amazing and deserved a stage to talk about that.

As Kemp mentioned, we really need to get the Dual XC capable fleet active. I know of too many amazing ships for XC training that sit idle in their trailer almost all of the time. Insuring them commercially is essentially not viable, so just give away the knowledge for the betterment of soaring.

Noel, for your club issues around instruction, do the instructors get paid? While I am a fan of low cost instruction, our instructors all charge for their time and we don't have any lack of willingness to pay for that time. The payments are direct to the instructor, not through the club and I think that works. Instructors are free to set their own rates, although we have a special deal for instructors to get free monthly membership if they limit their rates and are available on the field a couple of days a month.

One frustration I have in trying to motivate and introduce XC to people is a lack of interest/motivation. I've asked about interest in XC, send out forms to collect information from interested pilots on what they want to learn, but very few take the initiative to self assess and highlight elements that they want or need to work on.

There are exceptions to that of course. Those people are usually making huge leaps forward once strapped in the front of the Duo and being forced to think two or three moves farther ahead than they've ever been thinking in a club ship like a 1-26.

The answer for me is to continue to throw the offers out there and really pour the energy into those people that show initiative and promise. Ignite that fire. For others that are somewhat interested, I still try to get them up with me and show them what a 30 mile final glide is like when they've never been 6 miles from the runway before. You never know who might suddenly get the bug from seeing life beyond a 2-33.

One important thing. You don't need to be a CFIG to teach XC soaring. If the person is a licensed pilot, there is almost no benefit to the CFIG aspect. You need to be a good teacher, but the certificate is mostly irrelevant unless the person really needs to log instruction time for some reason. I think we rely too heavily on our limited CFIG for what really is mentoring.

Morgan