A good article - for another sport

These articles don't just appear out of thin air. Somewhere along the line,
someone got the reporter interested in the story.

All of us should be going out of our way to get as many media people exposed
to soaring as possible. This is something everyone can do. You'd be
surprised at how many people have a neighbor or a friend of a friend who is
a cameraman for the local TV station or a reporter for the local newspaper.

In particular, we should try to get the TV weather crews interested. They
are always looking for weather related stories to fill their timeslots.
Soaring is a perfect story for them.

Mike Schumann

"tienshanman" wrote in message
...

I just noticed this article in the NY times:

http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/09/18...8hang.html?hpw

When I saw this title I thought, great, an article about soaring.
Finally some large scale publicity via a reputable paper. But no, the
article is about hang gliding. Now, I have nothing against hang
gliding. In fact after a long and tumultuous past of flying hang
gliders and paragliders I finally moved over to the dark side and
finished my license for sailplanes just a month ago at the age of 53.
And I am desperately addicted (I wish I had started this a long time
ago). Having now flown the 3 kinds of recreational soaring craft I have
reflected a lot on why soaring seems to be fighting rear guard action. I
saw this HG'ing article in the NYT as just another symptom of why
soaring has been relegated to the most remote crannies of the public
mind and why is has a tenacious future propped up largely by a bunch of
geezers and an uninspiring national support orgn (SSA) which, by the
way, seems of late to focus way too much on the obituary column of the
sport. Depressing. Hang gliding itself suffered a rapid, massive die
off when paragliders appeared. I remember the glory days of hang
gliding while living near the Alps in the mid 80s. HG's everywhere,
hundreds of them. One day, after about a 5 min briefing, I flew one the
first paragliders that a buddy had bought and barely survived a 3 to 1
glide in terrain following mode down a ravine on a steep mountain in
Austria - I thought, well this sport obviously has no future. Wrong.
Now you go to pretty much any launch site in the Alps and HGs are
outnumbered at least 10/1 by bag wings. So it is quite interesting that
even though it is itself a sport on drip feed mode HG'ing gets its own
article in the NY Times. I can't remember every having seen an article
about soaring in the NYT. One wonders why. This sport needs some
serious young energy put into it..




--
tienshanman