On 8/18/2015 6:21 PM, son_of_flubber wrote:
I'm forever indebted to the CFI-Gs who proved that with enough patience
(and $s) almost anyone can learn to fly a glider.

CFI-Gs who don't have the skills or ambition to go farther than glide slope
from the airport influence their students.

A highly respected CFI-G says "I NEVER want to land out" (to budding pilots
gathered around the picnic table). "That's just dumb. Why would you get
off tow below 1500 AGL? Why take that risk?"

Not to be too anal about this particular situation, but for that particular
instructor's (I infer) lack of landout-related skills, I'd agree that putting
him/herself in a landout situation *would* be dumb. The trick for listeners is
to be sufficiently knowledgeable so's to understand said instructor's hidden
assumptions (non-antagonistic conversation helpful?), and thus, to be able to
intelligently decide if they apply to the listener. If they don't, there's
plenty of available evidence that "all over the board" opinions about the
wisdom of XC & landouts exist in every little bit of the U.S. clubs' soaring
world to which I've ever been exposed. Entirely normal human behavior.

FWIW, so far as I know, I was the first tyro licensee to make a landout in my
first club's recent history...adequately and safely taught by an instructor,
as I subsequently learned while retrieving him from a landout, who'd yet to
make *his* first landout. The club back then had plenty of flagpole sitters,
and a few seriously-beyond-my-newbie-skill-set ridge runners. (My flight
examiner then held the world O&R record.) It was clear to me that each pilot
chose his/her level of soaring participation, and such an approach seemed
entirely normal to me; still does.

Point being, circling back to your instructor's picnic table expounding, in
the absence of some sort of enlightening conversation actually discussing
*why* an instructor feels as they expound, why would Joe Listener want to take
any of their opinions beyond those directly applying to J.L.'s growing skills,
as universal gospel? Looking back, for me it was dirt simple to distinguish
beyond instruction likely to be directly applicable to my next instructional
flight, and my instructor's opining about "the more-distant future's"
requisite, or merely desirable, skills. Even though I was convinced he could
walk on water...

Bob - genuinely curious - W.