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The committee Link Mar 27 2018
James Bradley <<jb183>> writes:
Before the recent USHPA board meeting in Golden, Colorado, there were two several-hour sessions about creating a new future for hang gliding. Led by Bruce Weaver and facilitated by me, they were also attended by Matt Taber, Jayne DePanfilis, David Glover, Paul Murdoch, Martin Palmaz, Joe Greblo, Steve Pearson, John Harris and Nick Greece. They weren't official USHPA sessions, just some of us sitting down in a room for the first time.
These notes are mine and do not necessarily represent the thoughts of everyone in the room, though we had a pretty united look at it.
I believe the success of this effort will depend on
1. A real willingness to change, including things we/you might not feel like changing
2. A real willingness to experiment, try new things that no one has tried, learn from what happens and try again
3. Serious time and effort from volunteers who are already busy with other things in their lives
4. Some good luck that we can't anticipate, but that #1-3 might put us in the way of.
Here's a sketch of what we did:
(1) Identified issues: then moved on, because focusing on what's wrong leads only to incremental changes
(2) Drafted a “success fantasy”: it's 6 years from now and our efforts have gone very well, what does hang gliding look like in the US?
(3) Grouped the qualitative success fantasy elements into categories so we could consider approaches to each
(4) Teased out “First Steps" to do now that might have a chance of leading to the 6 year goals being realized in 6 years; all of these are experiments
(5) Made individual commitments to accomplishing all of the identified First Steps, by July 15 of this year.
Among those commitments was one by Steve Pearson of Wills Wing, to create a beginner hang glider model that is much easier to launch and land. A few days later Mike Meier of Wills Wing sent a note to a small list suggesting that as hang gliders have chased more performance they have become much more difficult to fly—ever since 1975! I'll let him decide when to share his detailed thoughts more widely, but he appears to agree that among current gliders even the beginner models are much too hard to launch and land, meaning they are dangerous and therefore require a high skill level to teach (high skill at both teaching and hang gliding). With this in mind our conversation included a fundamental reimagining of how hang gliding is taught and learned in the beginning stages, looking toward making it much easier to start and run a hang glider flight school than it is today, including the equipment, skills, planning and business prospects. What if it were easy enough that a moderately experienced hang glider pilot could get their instructor rating, buy a complete package of gear including teaching manuals and student workbooks, and start a flight school on any flat piece of ground with excellent student fun and safety?
We also had a frank discussion of the past and current culture of hang gliding, which has often not been inclusive, even of new hang pilots. Of course it's far from everyone who has acted this way, but negative interactions are unfortunately the most memorable. Personally I'll never forget a hang glider pilot screaming “no frame no brain!!” during one of my first paraglider launches in New England in 2007, and I don't remember anything else about that day.
Culture change is hard. This piece alone might need disciplined determination from every US hang glider pilot, not just to be welcoming and inclusive yourself, but to no longer tolerate another hang glider pilot acting like a dick. You have to be willing talk to those people. This difficult effort is required because we don't have time to wait for a generation to die off.
I hope the whiteboards memorialize most of our discussion, and as they were aimed at the people who were there they might be hard to follow. I encourage you to contact your colleagues who were in the room to fill you in. Most especially, if you would like to participate in this effort to reinvigorate hang gliding, please contact Bruce Weaver, who is leading the charge, at bruce (at) kittyhawk (dot) com.
I believe two things are vital to remember:
The age profile curve of USHPA's hang glider membership means that we will see dramatic drops in hang gliding numbers over the next few years, even if our efforts are successful. We have to remember to measure our success by other metrics than whether the blue line continues to slope down for awhile. It will, that's out of our control and it needs to be expected in the plan.
This isn't going to be a quick fix. It's going to take a sustained and determined effort by people who are willing to fail.
I came out of the meetings with a lot more optimism about hang gliding's possible future than I had before we started.
