Snippage...

...Sometime I think you are right. One club member I fly with has been
flying for 45 years. Is current glider is a ASG 29 with one vario, a 45
years old Badin type 100 mechanical vario, nothing else. Take off first
fly all over the place land last. I wonder??? Gilles

Unless your club member also flies contests or posts on the OLC, you don't
really know how efficiently and effectively he is flying. If it's been a
long time in the same place, he doesn't need navigation equipment, and
staying up a long time isn't difficult in an area one knows well.


Oookay - winter must be approaching in the northern hemisphere. :-)

Coupla comments...
- Certainly contests and OLC are helpful gauges of "soaring efficiency and
effectiveness" but, somehow or other, along the way I concluded people enjoy
the sport for a heckuva lot more reasons than "just" those two. SOMEthing
must've been keeping Gilles' fellow clubmember at it for the more than 3
decades he or she was at it before OLC came on the scene! Just my guess, of
course. If a person's having fun at soaring all their life, who am I to care
whether or not they're being efficient and effective, so long as they're being
safe and are happy. Everyone associated with the sport benefits. JMO...
- Regarding navigation, as one having gained the bulk of his soaring time
around mountains (Alleghenies and Rockies), I long felt no sectional was
necessary once a person had learned "their local area" - which of course might
easily have a radius of hundreds of miles. But then a friend broke his PIK-20
on a (horribly) botched outlanding in the mountains, not 35 air-miles from our
home field. His excuse at the time? "I couldn't find the airfield my sectional
said was in the valley!" So after commiserating with him for a while on the
grief he'd caused himself, we got around to the twin facts that he wasn't in
the valley he thought he was, and, the airfield didn't exist in any event.
Worse, had he flown his pattern properly - and into the wind (!) - the forest
opening that miraculously appeared when he absolutely needed one, would've
likely been landable damage-free. I'm sure there are several morals in this
dubious tale. The good news is my friend stuck with it and at least didn't
repeat his errors...
- As for staying aloft and soaring, in the intermountain west, the biggest
obstacle to doing so in the absence of airspeed and vario was - I found -
belief in one's ability to do so. XC soaring sans functioning ASI was
trivially easy, XC w/o functioning vario only slightly less so, while I had to
convince myself that I could (relatively) easily remain aloft without both,
before daring to venture XC. I blame all those experiences on water in the
lines and cheapness. No FARS were violated and no damage was inflicted on the
sailplane in the learning of these things...

Bob W.