At 15:30 30 December 2004, Plasticguy wrote:
Soaring is a sport with too much baggage.
It won't grow in America without some cultural
shift in the way we view ourselves. On whole
Americans are too selfish for the sport to work here.

If you want to do it 'American Style',
you usually need a glider of your own, somewhere to
tow from with a tow plane and at least one other skilled
person
(towpilot) available on your schedule. You will probably
need
a crewman (wife usually) to sit on the ground reading
a book
while you do your thing. The flying comes first in
most cases.

If you go soaring 'European style' it is usually at
a club venue
off winches with a larger body of participants. The
reasons
European clubs are more successful center around the
social
aspects of their cultures and the fact the flying is
important, but
there is a more communal spirit to soaring. It is
a bit less about flying
and a bit more about belonging to a community.

I'm off my soapbox....

Scott in Texas.

A proper test of this theory would be to examine clubs
that have lots of social activities and available cheap
gliders for members to fly (even X-C) and compare with
clubs that are more in the nature of syndicates to
provide tow planes for private owners and with just
a modicum of instruction and rental for local flying
only and little in the way of social activities. (This
would still be a dirty analysis because it doesn't
separate the second-class flying status and the social
activity in the two groups)