Club Glider Hangar?

As several others have commented my take would also be that the
motivation level of club members to get in the air and enjoy soaring
is not as high as it could be. I do believe that ready rigged gliders
are helpful, but at our club I can tell you that everyone of the
privately owned gliders has to be rigged each flying day and they are
enthusiastically . Sometimes one or other of the club gliders ( all
are assembled and in the hangar ) might not get taken out to the field
for flying ! The trainers usually are well used but the single seaters
are very poorly used, in fact we are selling one as we can't justify
having two .
Well done to the instructors who keep the enthusiasm level up with
students but shame on the rest of us for not encouraging and pushing
the post solo pilots into setting some goals like badge flying to help
them discover the FUN of leaving the field and cross country flying.
Over the years I have become convinced that one of the biggest dangers
for a club is to not spend time on encouraging new pilots and members
to seek improvements in their flying abilities.
Some ideas that have worked, and are aimed at better morale include:

* Encouraging Badge flying .
* Club boards posted in the hangar each new year for pilots to write
up good flights ( Best altitude , Best distance , Best
duration ,etc )
* Regular club contests ( modest cross country tasks , spot
landings ,etc )
* Taking new pilots on cross coutry flights in 2 seaters .

It might be worth considering a club member or two taking
responsibility for trying to promote some of these activities and
remember it's the next generation of soaring pilots that need to be
targetted . Good Luck.

Ron Clarke.

On Jan 9, 10:17*pm, "Mike Schumann" mike-nos...@traditions-
nospam.com wrote:
My personal feeling is that ease of access is a huge issue. *Our club has a
K8 and K7 that is hung in a large hanger. *Because people consider these
gliders to be a hassle to get down (about a 5 - 10 minute job), they are
rarely flown.


Mike Schumann


And I cannot explain the Junior...it sits on the floor of a hangar
collecting dust all season. I'd be surprised if it logged 10 hrs TTA.

Only once last year did we have all five ships on the line, and that
was a crappy day. The reason: the club president was acting flight
operations officer that day and pushed hard to get everything in the
air.

/Adam

On Jan 10, 5:09*pm, Adam wrote:
On Jan 9, 10:17*pm, "Mike Schumann" mike-nos...@traditions-

nospam.com wrote:
My personal feeling is that ease of access is a huge issue. *Our club has a
K8 and K7 that is hung in a large hanger. *Because people consider these
gliders to be a hassle to get down (about a 5 - 10 minute job), they are
rarely flown.

Mike Schumann

And I cannot explain the Junior...it sits on the floor of a hangar
collecting dust all season. I'd be surprised if it logged 10 hrs TTA.

Rigged? Amazing if it is. But do several other gliders have to be
pulled out to get at it? And is it very different to fly to anything
else that you have e.g. does it need a period of adjustment?


Only once last year did we have all five ships on the line, and that
was a crappy day. The reason: the club president was acting flight
operations officer that day and pushed hard to get everything in the
air.

/Adam

Our clib gliders live rigged in a hanger, getting another one in the
air is easy and we do it all the time if there is a queue to fly - and
that's a queue to fly Juniors!

As to rigging one's own glider, I'm looking forward to being able to
keep mine, rigged, in a hanger as I'm going to do my back in if I keep
rigging to fly. Plus, I can fly when I only have time to DI & fly,
rather than rig, DI, fly & derig. Finally it always feels to me like
rigging & derigging are times when a glider can be damaged, and I'm
keen to avoid that.

On Jan 10, 3:11*pm, BB wrote:
The problem may not be hardware. Our club has a beautiful ASW24 and
Duo Discus, along with a Blanik and ASK21, all of them hangared and
easy to take out. The 24 and duo get surprisingly little usage. Why?
Few of our members are checked out to fly them! Why not? We have
enough instructors, and they're all happy to do a checkout. But you
have to ask, read the manual, and take the time to do it, and in some
cases brush up your skills a bit.

Where I fly, the policy is to get new solo pilots into the single-
seater asap (of course their skills have to be suitable) as 1) we have
more of those than K21s, 2) it's less problematic for the club in
terms of lose of gliders if they have a accident, 3) people cannot be
instructed in a K21 that's being flown solo.

Most club members are happy to fly
the blanik solo and don't on their own take steps to move up. *It
sounds like your club has a similar situation, and based on our
experience the glass gliders might not get a lot more usage even if
they were hangared. In both situations, maybe what we need is some
organized push to get people to improve their skills.

I'd agree with that.




It's very interesting that your club members will buy and assemble
their own gliders, but not the club gliders. Do the club gliders have
other restrictions, like "you can only fly it for an hour" or "you
can't fly it cross country?" If so, the fact that members are willing
to assemble their own gliders suggests that removing these
restrictions is the key to getting more usage.

I rig and fly my own glider as much as possible as it's part of the
financial justification for buying it. My last good flight in a club
single-seater was about $130! In my own it would have been about $40
- just the aerotow cost.

Our club has a 1 hour
rule, but you're allowed to take the glider all afternoon IF you're
going to go cross country. That has helped (though there is still not
enough demand to learn to fly cross country)

Another idea. How about changing club policy so that the gliders get
assembled every day? Along with "gas up towplane" the first thing
clubmembers are expected to do before flying every day is "assemble
Apis", whether or not you personally want to fly it? Now the excuse is
gone.

I suspect you'd find people turning up late & leaving early to avoid
the heavy work...

On Jan 10, 4:35*pm, " wrote:
snip
Some ideas that have worked, and are aimed at better morale include:

* Encouraging Badge flying .

Do all the club single-seaters have loggers and/or barographs?

* Club boards posted in the hangar each new year for pilots to write
up good flights ( Best altitude , Best distance , Best
duration ,etc )

We have lots of cups given out every year at the annual dinner, in
addition there are the club ladders based on the BGA ladder.

snip

Adam wrote:
And I cannot explain the Junior...it sits on the floor of a hangar
collecting dust all season. I'd be surprised if it logged 10 hrs TTA.

How is it used? My club has two Juniors and which get well used. I'd put
that down to the following:

- all new solo pilots get booted out of the two seaters after 5 flights
and a couple of check rides and are converted to the Juniors. That
said, at first they'll be expected to take a check ride each day
before flying a Junior and the instructors will decide if the weather
is suitable. Once they're judged competent in them, the Junior pilots
are expected to fly within their capabilities on much the same basis
as any other solo pilot.

- we are a strong XC club, so Junior pilots are expected to work on
getting their Bronze and Silver badges. A lot of us did all three
Silver legs in a Junior. I did height and duration while working on
Bronze and got distance as soon as I had my Bronze XC endorsement.

For non-UK readers, the Bronze endorsement includes field selection,
field landing and navigation exercises.

- the club culture assumes that solo pilots will become XC pilots and
will work up the qualification ladder, first to their 100 km diploma
and then on to Gold and Diamond badges, so there's a clear path to
increasing skills and achievements for new pilots to follow.

- we also have a Pegase 90 and two Discii. These are run like a
syndicate with about 12 members. Single Seat Scheme members get a cost
discount in return for buying pre-paid blocks of air time and can book
the gliders for a day at a time with the expectation that they will go
XC in them. Other pilots can use them if they haven't been claimed by
Scheme members.

Maybe some variation of our approach would improve the Junior utilization?

I should add that I enjoy flying Juniors. They're nice handling gliders
that thermal well and spin nicely. I normally fly them during the winter
to maintain proficiency while my Libelle stays tucked up in its trailer.


--
martin@ | Martin Gregorie
gregorie. | Essex, UK
org |

It's very interesting that your club members will buy and assemble
their own gliders, but not the club gliders. Do the club gliders have
other restrictions, like "you can only fly it for an hour" or "you
can't fly it cross country?" If so, the fact that members are willing
to assemble their own gliders suggests that removing these
restrictions is the key to getting more usage.

The Private gliders tend to either be very light and easy to rig or
come with Cora trailers and rigging aids. They usually have automatic
hook-ups as well. The problem is as much in the trailer and support
gear as the glider. I'm in the same club as Noel, who started this
thread, am working hard to help get things in high gear, and think a
hanger is very important. But I won't need to keep my DG303 in it.

Thanks for all the input. Really helpfull.

Brian

Not only can you do damage to the glider when rigging and derigging, but
there have been numerous accidents resulting from rigging errors, quite a
few of which were fatal.

If you have the luxury of hangers, you end up with an inherently safer
operation. Not to mention the obvious advantages of time and effort that
become more important as we age.

It would be really helpful if we could get one of the companies marketing
steel hangers to come up with a standard glider hanger design so that
interested clubs would be able to order economical hanger kits that they can
either self build, or have erected by a local contractor.

Mike Schumann

"Cats" wrote in message
...
On Jan 10, 5:09 pm, Adam wrote:
On Jan 9, 10:17 pm, "Mike Schumann" mike-nos...@traditions-

nospam.com wrote:
My personal feeling is that ease of access is a huge issue. Our club has
a
K8 and K7 that is hung in a large hanger. Because people consider these
gliders to be a hassle to get down (about a 5 - 10 minute job), they are
rarely flown.

Mike Schumann

And I cannot explain the Junior...it sits on the floor of a hangar
collecting dust all season. I'd be surprised if it logged 10 hrs TTA.

Rigged? Amazing if it is. But do several other gliders have to be
pulled out to get at it? And is it very different to fly to anything
else that you have e.g. does it need a period of adjustment?


Only once last year did we have all five ships on the line, and that
was a crappy day. The reason: the club president was acting flight
operations officer that day and pushed hard to get everything in the
air.

/Adam

Our clib gliders live rigged in a hanger, getting another one in the
air is easy and we do it all the time if there is a queue to fly - and
that's a queue to fly Juniors!

As to rigging one's own glider, I'm looking forward to being able to
keep mine, rigged, in a hanger as I'm going to do my back in if I keep
rigging to fly. Plus, I can fly when I only have time to DI & fly,
rather than rig, DI, fly & derig. Finally it always feels to me like
rigging & derigging are times when a glider can be damaged, and I'm
keen to avoid that.



--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

On Jan 10, 11:36*am, "Mike Schumann" mike-nos...@traditions-
nospam.com wrote:
It would be really helpful if we could get one of the companies marketing
steel hangers to come up with a standard glider hanger design so that
interested clubs would be able to order economical hanger kits that they can
either self build, or have erected by a local contractor.


Mike -

The "Ensign" hangar and the "Sidewiser" hangar are standard designs
that are available as affordable kits. However, they're really only
good for 1 - 2 gliders. An economical solution for 5 - 20 gliders
(such as the design of the hangars at the Scottish Glider Centre) is
what we could use (and I suspect what a few other clubs could use as
well).

John -

Its funny you mention the time limit. That's really the ONLY reason I
went out and bought my Russia. Our club's Apis is being used so
seldom that I could have had a lot of fun in it - but I want to fly XC
and around here that means 3 - 5 hours. Our club limits the use of
club gliders to 1 hour (or 2 hours if you make radio contact after the
first hour and no one is in line for it). Some members claim that
there's an "exception clause" that allows the Apis to be flown all day
if you're the first person to rig it - but I have not found that rule
written into our club's bylaws and refuse to "cheat" the system that
way.

I have no "hard evidence" to back it up - but I personally feel that
it is a big discouragement to limit the flying time like that.
ESPECIALLY if people have to go through the trouble of rigging and de-
rigging the glider just to fly it for 1 or 2 hours!

...As far as training goes: I like the idea of kicking people out of
the 2-seaters at some point. I don't know if we can do it _right_
after solo - but certainly at some point afterwards. We are trying to
slim down our fleet some and people have objected to reducing our
Blanik count from 4 to 3, because they're used "so heavily". If we
only allowed instructional flights and demo rides in the Blaniks, I
think we could get away with only having 3 with no problem.

We get a lot of interested students who come out and sign up (and the
XC pilots in our club are really driving a lot of the interest and
enthusiasm around here); but then the new members leave the club
because they don't feel that they are getting timely instruction or
guidance. Some of that is their fault (showing up mid-day and
complaining about not getting more than 1 flight) - but some of it is
a lack of organization and operational rigidity. Instructors aren't
paired with students on a regular basis, you just come grab whatever
CFIG is available that day and he hops in the cockpit with you and
goes. Definitely less than ideal, IMHO.

It also doesn't help that our current club uses a clunky 1-36 as its
"transition trainer" to single-seaters. No one likes the aircraft, so
there's not a lot of enthusiasm to get students into it. Also, the
club that merged with us had a flight rule that _required_ students to
land a 1-26 out in a field, disassemble it, and trailer it back to the
airport. They had to do this before they could ever go cross-country
in club equipment.

These are all known issues that we're working to correct.

Information from other clubs on similar issues and how you've
conquered them are always appreciated!

Take care,

--Noel

At 19:42 10 January 2008, Mike Schumann wrote:
Not only can you do damage to the glider when rigging
and derigging, but
there have been numerous accidents resulting from rigging
errors, quite a
few of which were fatal.

If you have the luxury of hangers, you end up with
an inherently safer
operation. Not to mention the obvious advantages of
time and effort that
become more important as we age.

It would be really helpful if we could get one of the
companies marketing
steel hangers to come up with a standard glider hanger
design so that
interested clubs would be able to order economical
hanger kits that they can
either self build, or have erected by a local contractor.

Mike Schumann




I could put interested parties in touch with the designer
of the Scottish Gliding Union hangar and you could
adopt a proven design. It would be hard to come up
with a more space and material efficient design. There
is another one being constructed at an English club
and a second one is being planned for Portmoak making
3 in total. The second Portmoak hangar will probably
have minor changes to the roof height and pitch to
cater for high dihedral wingletted gliders like the
V 2cxT and D2cT. There will also be a gravel floor
rather then the mix in the original hangar and also
detail changes to the door runners.

The design is based around bays suitable for 18m gliders
although, because the two rows of gliders are necessarily
offset, there is one smaller 15m bay and one larger
bay (for Duos) etc at each end of the hangar.

The second SGU hangar will be entirely financed by
individual and syndicate private glider owners but
owned by the club. (All the club gliders are already
housed in the first hangar) The investors will get
16 years free hangarage and trailer parking before
having to pay for their hangar bay. Within that period
they will have the right sell the residual time in
that bay at whatever price they can get for it. A
similar financial model might interest other clubs.

John Galloway