How do we inspire pilots to truly take up cross country soaring ?

On Tuesday, August 18, 2015 at 1:20:03 PM UTC-4, Sean Fidler wrote:
I can't disagree that a majority of people are generally pretty lazy. They generally want to be the master of the "sport"' or "activity" in minutes or hours, not months or years.

They also want to feel assured of a predictable favorable result pretty much all the time. That is, I think, why the list of people who want to go XC with me is very long, yet those that go by themselves later is much much shorter.
The worry about landing out is a really big deterrent, even where we fly in an area with a lot of airports to land on.
The best we can do is find the live ones and bring them along.
UH

On Tuesday, August 18, 2015 at 12:41:16 PM UTC-4, Tango Eight wrote:

It simply isn't possible to provide more encouragement than we already do.

Evan Ludeman / T8

I forgot to mention: among the inducements is a chance to go fly the White Mountains -- the only real alpine soaring to be found in the Eastern US -- with airport landing options the whole way. It's the best XC milk run in the known universe.

Easy day: http://tinyurl.com/poj7tlk

Less easy day: http://tinyurl.com/ptx3lle

But objectively, we're the weirdos. Most people don't want to do this.

Evan Ludeman / T8

On Tuesday, August 18, 2015 at 12:41:16 PM UTC-4, Tango Eight wrote:
On Tuesday, August 18, 2015 at 12:12:55 PM UTC-4, Sean Fidler wrote:
Hmmmmm. Last I checked, I did not see a large crowd of US female pilots who compete with the men. SKA is a fairly unique person! We need dozens more!

The reason why women are not competing in US contests is an interesting discussion point (new thread?). It is not a physical thing of course. In fact women have a physical advantage (in addition to their mental/emotional strengths!). It's also not a financial thing. So, what is it? I believe that both Europe and Australia have far more women competing in contests.

Personally, I would think that if: A) women's soaring was to grow in the US someday and B) 5-10 women were attending a future US contest...many of those women would appreciate a separate women's classification in the same way juniors would. Maybe I am wrong but I would definitely want to hear from "other women" as well when/if they hopefully materialize some day.

Remember, I am proposing an overall scoring for everyone (as normal) but individual clasifications (per suggestions) for beginner, various SSA ranking levels and of course feminine.

IOW, if we magically had 3 women at a contest in 2016, they should get a gold, silver and bronze medal no matter what their overall scores happen to be! They should be celebrated along with Jr's and beginners! Building numbers these competition categories (beginners, juniors and women) at our future events Is FAR MORE important to the US Soaring community than overall winners.

We simply have to do something significant to stem this tide of shrinking or stale numbers. It costs nothing to try these ideas. If it fails, so what? Let's not continue to sit on our hands in almost every aspect of our organization. We need some big ideas and some serious innovation. The sport of soaring is incredible...we need to market it and compete. Simple as that.

Just my opinion of course!

Sean
7T

You can't even stay on your own topic :-).

I'm much more interested in promoting XC. Competition is just one little piece of the whole.

People are just lazy. That's my opinion. My evidence includes the fact that one can join my own club (including one time initiation) for about 1/2 what most of us pay to insure *old* gliders and (when qualified) get the keys to an HpH 304c. Yep, a real, live 40+:1 glass slipper, equipped for basic XC and with a serviceable trailer too. The number of people who grab this opportunity is astonishingly small. Those that do almost invariably get smitten with the sport and move whatever pieces of heaven and earth are required to procure their own high performance glider (leaving the 304 available for the next convert!).

Most people, most *pilots* just don't want to put in the work.

It simply isn't possible to provide more encouragement than we already do..

Evan Ludeman / T8

Evan, your club's approach is working! Why are you saying people are too lazy? Some got converted. For such a small club you probably have higher conversion rate than most clubs.
Andrzej

I think it has been said, but if the culture of the club is an XC culture, then you will fledge more pilots. I fly with the Greater Boston Soaring Club. We are a large club, and have many regular XC pilots. When I started to fly with GBSC I joined the board, and made a few policy suggestions that would promote XC in the club. A fellow board member commented, "Promote XC, don't we discourage XC". And I think he was right, our policy's made it difficult, at the time I think I was the only cross country pilot on the board. Even with that headwind, we have made significant improvements in policy, and training. We have far to go, but the trailer trash end of the field is getting larger all the time.

Things we have done that helped.

Set up a XC mentor "dating service". If you are new, don't know the folks that are rigging their own gliders, I would match up a member that expressed interest in learning XC and matched them up with an experienced pilot. They could ask questions, perhaps get some encouragement etc.

We have 3 encampments each year, 2 "somewhat" focused on badge flying. One at Mifflin, and one at Mt Washington. A place like Mifflin where the off field options are so good, can ease the fear of leaving the nest.

We have put on a winter (or early spring) XC ground school. We put on a two evening presentation. The usual stuff, thermaling, fly to the next airport, call it home, repeat. Roy Bourgeois has a great off field landing review, with shots from the air, and on the ground for field selection.

I have done some lead follow, I now have a piece of a duo, and expect to do some dual.

Things I want to do:

Not all of our instructors are XC pilots, this is fine, but the elemental skills for XC can be taught locally, and I hope to put together a series of lessons, thermaling, gliding, a very local 25k triangle for confidence building, and an intentional land out at a nearby airport. I agree with Hank, that the fear of land outs is very high. In power flying, you end up at other airports all the time, but if you have learned to fly at our club, new pilots only fly from our local field. Landing "out", even at an airport is scary.

But the club culture is at the heart of this. If the club encourages advancement of your flying skills at least to silver, then that is a good place to decide if farther is for you. For some it is not, for others, they may move to competition, or records. But the bottom line, we have seen far more conversion to private ownership, and XC than we had in the past. You need to keep helping those along, not all will want to go, but those that do, tend to stick with it...

As a relative noob to the sport of soaring with just a handful of PIC hrs, perhaps my input may shed some light on this issue.

We need to accept that there nothing unique in soaring that isn't encountered in learning other challenging endeavors. Soaring doesn't lack excitement so we needn't be apologists for it. Learning a difficult skill is what lacks excitement for majority of people and that's nothing new. What's new is perhaps that more people are looking for easy fun. People will walk 26.2 miles and claim that they ran a marathon, but few are willing to train for many years and suffer the injuries to run it in under 3 hrs. Truth: there's no walking through aviation training and flying cross-country solo requires years of experience. Do prospective students know that or do they expect instant gratification coming into it?

It is a fact of life that not everyone who's inspired by a masterful performance (or a Youtube soaring video) has what it takes to become a master themselves. Think of a kid that listens to a concert pianist and wants to take piano lessons without considering how many scales and arpeggios they'll have to suffer through during the following 10 years. Those with talent and perseverance will get there, but the majority of students will move on to easier pursuits. Before my own checkride last year I had a conversation with another student. He seemed uninspired and to paraphrase, was "still waiting for the fun part". The pursuit of mastery isn't always fun. Mastery itself is always fun, but that has to be earned. I have frequently questioned my own desire to pursue soaring starting with the first few patterns to the more recent unsatisfying flights. Earlier this year I was still waiting for the fun part. That is until last month when I had what I would call a breakthrough flight, a glimpse of what the "masters" experience. It took perseverance.

In conclusion, soaring is not poetry. If fact, a student will quickly learn that initially if feels more like rap. If it is to be considered a legitimate sport, perhaps we should learn from other sports and provide students with mentoring and coaching, not just instruction. Explain to them all the steps involved and help them set realistic goals and create a plan for attaining them, and yes, help inspire them when they are discouraged. Cross-country flight or competition is the big prize and the end of a journey. If athletes are to be attracted to this sport the slogan needs to change from "Soaring - the poetry of aviation" to something like "Soaring - have you got what it takes to fly a plane without an engine?".

On Tuesday, August 18, 2015 at 2:51:28 PM UTC-4, Andrzej Kobus wrote:
On Tuesday, August 18, 2015 at 12:41:16 PM UTC-4, Tango Eight wrote:
On Tuesday, August 18, 2015 at 12:12:55 PM UTC-4, Sean Fidler wrote:
Hmmmmm. Last I checked, I did not see a large crowd of US female pilots who compete with the men. SKA is a fairly unique person! We need dozens more!

The reason why women are not competing in US contests is an interesting discussion point (new thread?). It is not a physical thing of course. In fact women have a physical advantage (in addition to their mental/emotional strengths!). It's also not a financial thing. So, what is it? I believe that both Europe and Australia have far more women competing in contests.

Personally, I would think that if: A) women's soaring was to grow in the US someday and B) 5-10 women were attending a future US contest...many of those women would appreciate a separate women's classification in the same way juniors would. Maybe I am wrong but I would definitely want to hear from "other women" as well when/if they hopefully materialize some day.

Remember, I am proposing an overall scoring for everyone (as normal) but individual clasifications (per suggestions) for beginner, various SSA ranking levels and of course feminine.

IOW, if we magically had 3 women at a contest in 2016, they should get a gold, silver and bronze medal no matter what their overall scores happen to be! They should be celebrated along with Jr's and beginners! Building numbers these competition categories (beginners, juniors and women) at our future events Is FAR MORE important to the US Soaring community than overall winners.

We simply have to do something significant to stem this tide of shrinking or stale numbers. It costs nothing to try these ideas. If it fails, so what? Let's not continue to sit on our hands in almost every aspect of our organization. We need some big ideas and some serious innovation. The sport of soaring is incredible...we need to market it and compete. Simple as that.

Just my opinion of course!

Sean
7T

You can't even stay on your own topic :-).

I'm much more interested in promoting XC. Competition is just one little piece of the whole.

People are just lazy. That's my opinion. My evidence includes the fact that one can join my own club (including one time initiation) for about 1/2 what most of us pay to insure *old* gliders and (when qualified) get the keys to an HpH 304c. Yep, a real, live 40+:1 glass slipper, equipped for basic XC and with a serviceable trailer too. The number of people who grab this opportunity is astonishingly small. Those that do almost invariably get smitten with the sport and move whatever pieces of heaven and earth are required to procure their own high performance glider (leaving the 304 available for the next convert!).

Most people, most *pilots* just don't want to put in the work.

It simply isn't possible to provide more encouragement than we already do.

Evan Ludeman / T8

Evan, your club's approach is working! Why are you saying people are too lazy? Some got converted. For such a small club you probably have higher conversion rate than most clubs.
Andrzej

The puzzle is that there isn't more demand.

Otoh, we're churning out CFIGs right now, a trio of which are in the process of founding a new club in Maine. I guess that counts for something too.

It is true that despite being only about two dozen active members, we can instruct & mentor just about anything.

-Evan

I'm a newly licensed glider pilot, and I can't wait to start flying XC. I recently restarted my training after an 8 year hiatus. One of the things that motivated me to get back into soaring is the development of electric sustainers. Having the ability to flip a switch and be confident that the motor will start every time makes XC way less intimidating to me. The risk, and more importantly, the massive hassle of a landout is a real turn-off, personally. I know that I will still have to be prepared for the possibility of a landout even with an e-sustainer, but it seems improbable enough to ease my anxiety about it.

Granted, I don't have a glider with an electric sustainer available to me right now, but after I gain some XC experience with my local club, one may be in my future.

Perhaps if/when electric sustainers become more common in soaring clubs, more people will be willing to fly XC. They may even bring in a new class of people to the sport who would be too afraid to try even local soaring due to the lack of self-propulsion.

On Tuesday, August 18, 2015 at 3:25:06 PM UTC-4, wrote:
I'm a newly licensed glider pilot, and I can't wait to start flying XC. I recently restarted my training after an 8 year hiatus. One of the things that motivated me to get back into soaring is the development of electric sustainers. Having the ability to flip a switch and be confident that the motor will start every time makes XC way less intimidating to me. The risk, and more importantly, the massive hassle of a landout is a real turn-off, personally. I know that I will still have to be prepared for the possibility of a landout even with an e-sustainer, but it seems improbable enough to ease my anxiety about it.

Granted, I don't have a glider with an electric sustainer available to me right now, but after I gain some XC experience with my local club, one may be in my future.

Perhaps if/when electric sustainers become more common in soaring clubs, more people will be willing to fly XC. They may even bring in a new class of people to the sport who would be too afraid to try even local soaring due to the lack of self-propulsion.

Perhaps if you crewed for someone and helped by doing a retrieve or 2 you would find out that while inconvenient(you're gonna be late for dinner), very few turn out to be a "massive hassle". Out of the many more than 100 field landings I have made, only a couple would fall in that category. Many were pleasant interesting experiences that allowed me to meet a bunch of very nice folks.
UH

If it is to be considered a legitimate sport, perhaps we should learn from other sports and provide students with mentoring and coaching, not just instruction. Explain to them all the steps involved and help them set realistic goals and create a plan for attaining them, and yes, help inspire them when they are discouraged.

That there, ladies and gents, is an encapsulation of a lot of the prior discussion.

I'm not sure that a passion for XC is "innate" - people often get the gliding bug only after their first flight. Similarly, the passion for XC often comes only after you've been shown the possibilities. It's a series of stepping stones with no true ending; some of the hops are bigger than others and sometimes the waters seem deeper and scarier than they really are. For those instances, friends, mentors and coaches will get people onto the next stone and the next challenge. Sometimes you just need to add more stones to lessen the length of the leaps.

DH

Agreed! Spark plugs! One on one personal relationships and true mentorship.

The other side of the coin is the type of person with the perseverance and drive to seek out the mentor. It's one thing to try and motivate and inspire someone, it's a completely different thing to have them ID YOU as a source of help, knowledge and motivation and make it easy for you to do so. A pleasure to help them...etc.

But those are very rare birds indeed.