Volunteers with the Soaring Society of America have been closely
following the recent action by the FAA in ordering inspections of
Blanik L-13 sailplanes. The nature of the inspections required has
resulted in what amounts to a virtual grounding of the L-13 fleet in
the United States.

The good news is that the FAA has been very willing to talk to our SSA
representatives (JIm Short, in particular, has taken the lead on this
one) and has been willing to discuss options. The bad news is that to
some extent the FAA's hands are tied because the problem originated in
Europe and the initial airworthiness directives came out of Europe.

This is a very complex and serious problem for many soaring clubs and
commercial operators in the United States and we want everyone to know
that SSA was on top of the situation from the beginning.
Unfortunately, we were not able to achieve a "quick fix" through
diplomacy. Rather, the problems with the Blanik are apprently quite
real and they require an engineering solution. We hope that there are
technologically-savvy Blanik owners in the US soaring community can
find such a solution quickly and that when they do it can be shared
with the rest of us.

What SSA can do at this point is help facilitate the discussion and
spread of useful information. To that end, we are putting regular
postings of Blanik information on the homepage of the SSA website. I
encourage those of you interested in this problem to check out the
postings there regularly -- as well as the postings on this RAS
discussion site.

Phil Umphres, Chairman,
The Soaring Society of America, Inc.