US Hawks Hang Gliding Association

I have posted this information on hang gliding .org. I have no idea what will happen to it when the gestapo sees it.

Here is a copy of my posting:

If you want to keep your hang rating but you don’t need $150 per year USHPA insurance to fly your sites there are three options.

You can petition USHPA to change their rules and allow you to keep your ratings even if you don’t pay the $150 per year. I wish you good luck with this one, it will fall on deaf ears.

There are two other organizations which, if you send them a photo copy of your USHPA rating, even if it has already expired, will put you in their permanent data base of hang glider ratings, so that you keep your ratings. Remember, you could fly every day of your life but if you don’t maintain your USHPA membership for three years your rating will be purged from their records.

The moderator of this forum will not allow me to list these other organizations, so you will have to search for them. If I listed them here he will change the URL to some silly names.

One of these organizations require a membership but there are no dues. The other is a data base which not only doesn’t require membership but you couldn’t join it if you wanted to. It is just a national data base of hang ratings, no members.

The moderator may still lock, pull, or basement this useful information for hang glider pilots, information which could save you money if you are in this situation of not needing site insurance.

I am not advocating quitting USHPA, I’m still current as member # 7 but if you don’t need the insurance, why pay $150 per year just to keep your hang rating on the books.

Look into it,
Frank Colver

This is a Big Issue, Frank.
Bizarrely, you can't discuss Big Issues on the USHPA nanny doppelganger sites.
You'll have to go to one of those other sites you mentioned to discuss Big Issues like affordable membership or permeable, non-disappearing-ink ratings. In other words, the common sense stuff.
Hope you can find it. See you there!        
-----------
NOTE: The term nanny doppelganger site was coined by Rick Masters at 1:18 in the morning to describe a place that shouldn't be visited without blinders on and your mommy.

Rick Masters wrote:non-disappearing-ink ratings

From "behind the iron curtain" at doppleganger.org:

miraclepieco saluting Joe Faust wrote:I express my heartfelt appreciation to those who are freely keeping a hang gliding rating system for no other reason than a genuine love of the sport and a sincere desire to facilitate and perpetuate it.

Well, for some strange reason this posting I made on HG.org has disappeared from that forum, this morning. I can't imagine that I could have written it any more un-offensive than I did. It was just information that could be helpful for some HG pilots who don't need to pay for insurance where they fly but would like to keep their hang ratings on record.

Frank

Frank Colver wrote:Well, for some strange reason this posting I made on HG.org has disappeared from that forum, this morning..

Now you know - first hand - why we have the U.S. Hawks.

Frank, you've missed a lot of the nastiness that's happened to the sport you founded nearly fifty years ago. Now you're getting to see it at USHPA, hanggliding.org, and many other places. It's an eye opening experience, and one that's hard to believe ... until you've seen it first hand.

All I can say is that we're glad to have you back to help us fight the cancer in the sport of hang gliding. With you and Joe and Rick and Bill and Sam and Scott and Ernie and Logan and Mike and Michael and Tony and Jim and Brian and Doug and Neil and Warren and (maybe?) Red, we just might have a prayer of fixing it.

Yes, Bob, it is sad to me to see where this sport has gone from the truly "free flying" days of old. You deserve a lot of kudos for US Hawks, thanks!

As for HG.org forum I have reposted it under "What happened?" after editing out anything I thought could be even slightly offensive comment. It is very sanitized now. We'll see how long this "milquetoast" one stays up.

Frank

By sg - Sat Nov 03, 2018 1:57 pm
Post was reported as shilling for a banned member.

Rule being violated:
"* No proxying for banned members in any way."

Also, people who enter a private business and poke fun at the business owner should not be surprised when asked to leave or their bulletins removed.
I do NOT have time for this nonsense. When people are banned from this site for constantly causing drama, they do not get to continue pushing their agendas through proxies.

You dont have to take part on this site. Dont like a TV channel? Change it.

But stop posting stuff for banned members. It gets reported, people see right through it, and I dont have the time to deal with it.

Its well known that banned member strategize how to get their voice heard on the sites they are banned from. Sorry.... they are not entitled to other peoples property and bandwidth. Go talk about that stuff on the other forum. After all, they have their whole own forum to complain on.

Org users and traffic are on an uptrend. The tiny percentage of extremists who have run people off this site for far too long, will no longer be tolerated here.

If you continue to proxy for people, you will be asked to leave.

/thread

Read more: http://forum.hanggliding.org/viewtopic. ... z5Vohxmxyh

As for "drama" it is found that Jack foments the largest drama on his own forum by his draconian interruptions.

It seemed like Frank was not "proxying" for someone, but was forwarding his own individual thrust. I know that I did not contact Frank for the matter. But now it looks that Jack will censor anything he does not like via some theory of "proxying." It seems to me that Jack is the only one who runs people "off his site." Maybe he will ban himself soon.
Jack does not follow one of his key policies: He wants to be treated like any other poster; well, he does not follow that policy.

Sharp HG posters may be turning the channel away from Jack's flow that cannot be trusted to hold important ideas about hang gliding. Who knows how much Jack has deleted, changed, obscured, rewritten, taken off the table, ... ?

Now we all get to see what a liar Jack Axoupolous is.

Jack Axoupolous wrote:"I do NOT have time for this nonsense."

If it were truly a matter of "time" then Jack could just let people speak their minds (gee, what a novel idea) and spend zero (0.00000000 nanoseconds) of his time silencing people.

Yet Jack Axoupolous somehow finds the time to ban people. He finds the time to change their posts. He finds the time to bury people's posts in his basement. He finds the time to program his entire web site to change the web addresses of USHawks.org and USHGRS.org to something else. He's a liar right there to say that he doesn't have "time".

Jack does all of these things because he's a control freak and he wants to control what people can and can't say. He's also greedy and in bed with USHPA. About a decade ago Jack proposed a "lead generation" program to USHPA where Jack would get a cut of the profits. USHPA turned him down so Jack went on the warpath against USHPA. That's why Jack embraced the HGAA when I proposed an alternative to USHPA back in 2010. But somewhere along the line, Jack Axoupolous and USHPA made up. That was evident when Jack helped raise funds for USHPA's RRRG. Jack put up a big banner to encourage donations, and we'll probably never know what he got in return.

It's nothing but greed and/or power with Jack and Davis and USHPA. There's no "love of the sport" in any of them. It's all love of themselves.

Also, aside from being an outright liar (see previous post) Jack Axoupolous is now becoming the "Thought Police" when he accuses Frank of "shilling" for Joe.

Maybe it never dawned on Jack that Frank knows first hand about USHPA's "pay to play" rating system. Frank's been a loyal member of USHPA literally from day one. Yet for a few years he opted for the lower cost membership and found that all his ratings had vanished. If he'd just added a few more dollars to his check every year, he'd still have all those ratings that he earned.

So, better than almost anyone in the sport, Frank knows very well the value of an independent (and not for greed) rating system like Joe's new USHGRS. That's exactly what Frank's post was all about. It was about sharing an idea - a thought - regardless of who was implementing it. It was a thought based on Frank's own experience of losing his own ratings.

But certain thoughts are not allowed on hanggliding.org and Jack enforces it with Gestapo-like efficiency. The timid "members" of Jack's little kingdom cower in silence as Jack bans and bullies some of the best people in hang gliding.

Rick was right. Hang gliding isn't dying, it's being murdered.

The timid "members" of Jack's little kingdom cower in silence...

Is this really what hang gliding has been reduced to?        
To my eyes, the situation has been intolerable for years.
Hanggliding.org and ozreport are only tiny symptoms of the larger problem:
the subjugation of hang gliding by parachuting.
Yet so few are willing to address it or even criticize it.
Instead, they attack the victims and those who wish to bring back the sport.
Pathetic.