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Post Re: Torrey Tandem Recision of Authority Mon, Oct 3 2016, 8:28:07 pm
I don't normally post statements to websites, and I'm not a politician or statesman, so if this communication doesn't answer all the questions that have been directed to me recently, my apologies, but this was the best I could do.
I have seen the e-mail that was forwarded by USHPA to an untold number of folks. Some of what is contained in the e-mail is true, and some of its suggestions are not. It is true that at the Torrey Pines Gliderport my company has not recently ordered 30-day memberships. Over the years, we have ordered tons of them; recently, however, because we are not insured by the RRG, we haven't needed them (because their cost involves an insurance payment of sorts).
Despite that, it has always been our intent to continue to order them in order to support the organization and the sport, but after two days of meetings, we have not been able to agree with USHPA on a price that would be fair under those changed circumstances. We are still open to continuing that discussion, but in the meantime, we are utilizing another organization's exemption for our tandems. There's nothing nefarious in that, it's simply what we feel we have to do to keep the doors open -- at least in the short term. USHPA's e-mail at least impliedly adopted the same direction by stating that this revocation was "… continuing until further notice."
Obviously, the e-mail's suggestion that there were no other options for tandem exemptions is not correct, there are. That said, it is not our goal to place USHPA at any kind of disadvantage. In fact, the more people are involved in tandem instruction, the more likely people are to come back to a site (whether that is Torrey or any other site in any other place around the country or the world) to gain more targeted instruction and ratings of their own. We still provide individualized instruction through USHPA rated instructors, and we still rate those students within the USHPA system. Those people go on to fly at various sites and are added to our cohort as fellow pilots and lovers of air sports.
Another thing that the e-mail seems to imply is that there are huge numbers of accidents at our site. There aren't. The number of incidents that occur at Torrey, when compared to the number of flights has been -- and continues to be -- among the lowest in the world. It is true that incidents do, regrettably, sometimes occur. When they do, we rely on our pilots to report them to USHPA. We believe that they have and do, at least through the mandatory on-line reporting system. We have recently been made aware that one of our pilots have not reported through the AIRS system and that one incident from 2015 was not fully reported by the pilot conducting the flight (though other pilots who witnessed the incident state they did make reports). We continue to investigate these issues, but we take issue with the suggestion that there are loads of tandem accidents at Torrey unreported to USHPA, because the fact is that's not true. While the authors intent may not have been to convey that suggestion, it's clear that I'm not the only one who made that connection because others on this board seem to have thought it said the same thing. In the interest of transparency and full disclosure, we will be reaching out to USHPA early this week to further discuss what's missing and what needs to be provided.
Item four of this e-mail states that we are "…conducting tandem flights that do not comply with all of the operating conditions of FAA Exemption 4721 issued to USHPA for tandem instructional flights." That's partially correct. FAA Exemption 4721 requires, among other things, that "both occupants on all two-place training flights must possess a current pilot rating issued by the USHPA and at least one occupant must possess a current USHPA Tandem instructor rating." As I've said, we have not fully stopped issuing 30-day memberships. The weather in San Diego has been, well, challenging, for air sports recently, so we are not conducting as many tandems as we usually do. But when we do conduct them, we are sometimes (not always) not issuing 30-day memberships with them. Those flights, it would be correct to say, are not complying with the exemption because the occupant on that training flight is not a member. But again, we are still very interested in working with USHPA to find a solution to this economic problem. Once that occurs, we trust that USHPA will issue its "further notice" rescinding this apparently temporary revocation.
A lot has been made on-line and by some phoning me of the political reasons behind these moves. As I started by saying, I am not a politician and I have no interest in being one. USHPA's motives are for others to discuss and judge. To be sure, there have been several situations in which USHPA and I have not seen eye to eye. But my hope has been, and remains, that we can move past all that. If any of you have seen the profit and loss documentation included in the RFP documents, and I know some of you have by your comments here, I am not in this for the money. I do this for the same reason you all do, for a love of the sport. Very little else is more important to me, which is the reason I'm writing this. I'm not looking to address the USHPA e-mail here for any reason other than to let all of you, fellow pilots, know where I stand.
Suffice it to say, we will hope for a speedy and amicable resolution to this situation in the near future.
Please feel free to post this on the other forums!
Robin
