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.

For the whiteboards here:
http://ozreport.com/pub/images/HGmtgWhiteboardsMarch2018.zip