[Rick Masters]

Building the US Hawks can only be done by HG purists who believe that gliding canopies are a risky mistake.

It cannot be done by people with one foot in the HG camp and the other in the PG camp.

Sorry Bob, but you really blew it on this one.

[Bob Kuczewski]

Building the US Hawks can only be done by HG purists who believe that gliding canopies are a risky mistake.

I don't believe this is true, Rick. We don't have to believe that paragliding is a "risky mistake" to want to build a hang gliding association. We just have to care about hang gliding and be willing to work to protect and promote it.

It cannot be done by people with one foot in the HG camp and the other in the PG camp.

What about people who have one foot in the HG camp and one foot in the sailplane camp? Wasn't USHGA's early leadership guided by sailplane pilots?

Sorry Bob, but you really blew it on this one.

I'm sorry Rick, but I don't subscribe to the notion that supporting hang gliding means trashing paragliding any more than I believe that supporting hang gliding means trashing any other sport.

However, I will say that USHPA has become a paragliding association, and many of the people in paragliding leadership roles don't care at all about hang gliding. I would like to see that reversed in USHPA, but the trend doesn't appear to be going that way. So hang gliding will either be marginalized within USHPA or hang gliding will create its own organization. I'm in favor of the latter.

More specifically, with regard to me "blowing it on this one", I believe that the US Hawks has grown very slowly because of anti-competitive practices of Jack Axaopoulos ("sg" on hanggliding.org). Jack has banned myself and others who would promote (or even mention) the US Hawks because he wants to maintain his near monopoly status in the sport of hang gliding. Jack did a similar thing with the HGAA. He claimed that he was kicking people out because he wanted to grow it, and he got his way. But did he grow it? No. Go to http://hgaa.org right now and see what became of Jack's association after he seized control (it's currently the "Hazel Grove Agricultural Association" ) . Jack killed the HGAA because it would have been a democratically controlled forum that would have competed with his absolute control at hanggliding.org.