The locals are happy on any day to show you around, so take
advantage of their hospitality
(Eliminator launch)
Anne-Odile Thomas <aomthomas>,
president of the Santa Barbara hang gliding and paragliding club, writes:
Our guide service is FREE (you don't get much for free anymore). Our main concern is that pilots get briefed on the local sites to maximize their
flying experience here: learn about our Lzs, flying guidelines, local weather
conditions, best places to get lift, pitfalls to avoid, etc. As you noticed this
weekend, our wind patterns can be quite interesting, and deceiving at times on
launch. Some good local knowledge is often crucial to make sure that visitors
don't put themselves in an un-necessary scary or dangerous situation. This past
weekend was a good example of it, as you witnessed it first hand. With the right
knowledge though, pilots will have a blast here.
One more thing to mention about the beach and Parma Park: pilots should only
consider flying to the beach if they feel comfortable landing at Parma Park (in
addition to having an advanced rating). Odds are that you won't always be high
enough to fly out to the beach. If they don't feel comfortable landing at Parma,
they should fly from the Alternator launch, which offers a much friendlier LZ. This is the LZ that James uses for his students on their first mountain flights,
and it is much more forgiving.
No USHPA sanctioned hang gliding meets in 2007, part 2
Wed, Oct 25 2006, 8:23:38 am PDT
Is the USHPA leadership out to destroy hang gliding competition?
So how did the USHPA President respond to my indictment of the
USHPA leadership on the question of support, leadership, and guidance for hang
gliding competition in the US? Well let's say that she wasn't pleased. While I
won't quote her as I haven't asked for permission to do so (and won't), I'll
accurately paraphrase what she said.
She wanted to make sure that I and all the other members of the Executive
Committee knew that she felt that the problem with competition has been going on
for years.
Going on for years?
THE PROBLEM? Exactly what was the problem was Lisa referring to?
The problem I was referring to was the fact that in 2006 we had four USHPA
sanctioned hang gliding competitions and zero in 2007. But as far as Lisa was
concerned that wasn't the problem. She had a much different problem in mind, and
perhaps she wanted to solve that problem and not deal with the problem as I saw
it, the problem that we've got right now, the problem of no USHPA sanctioned
hang gliding competitions in 2007. The problem that we didn't have last year,
when we had a different Competition Committee Chairman.
So I wrote back:
I wonder what problem Lisa is referring to.
Last year we had four hang gliding competitions that were sanctioned by the
USHGA.
Same was true the year before.
This was due to a strong working relationship between the Competition Committee
Chairman and the meet organizers.
In addition the Competition Committee Chairman went and got funds from the USHGF
to support the training of a meet organizer in New Mexico.
This year zero. That is the big change that has happened under the current
regime and it is due SOLEY to a failure of leadership at ALL levels. This is the
PROBLEM.
Previously we had a Competition Committee Chairman that actually cared about
supporting competition, recently we had a Competition Committee Chairman that
cared more about free enterprise than about the competition pilots.
I certainly hope your statement above does not represent your personal agenda,
the Idaho agenda. The failed agenda. Your position on the competition system (as
was written into the strategic plan) in the US is a minority position and one
that doesn't have the support of competition pilots in the US (as evidenced but
the strong support of competition shown by these pilots).
I have been in contact with Lisa Tate for many years, long before
she was elevated to the position of President of the USHPA. Lisa for many years
has also been the King Mountain Meet organizer and has refused repeatedly to
sanction the King Mountain meet as a USHPA sanctioned meet, even after she
became the president of the USHPA.
She may or may not have honorable reasons for her decision to keep her meet
unsanctioned, but the point is that she has a personal agenda re competition and
as USHPA President she appears to be pursuing that agenda to the detriment of
the US competition pilots. Her actions as President and as chairman of the USHGA
Planning Committee indicate that she is pursuing this agenda, which is fine if
it in fact helped increase and support competition, but if it is not, it is a
bad policy and should be named as such.
Come and hang out with the Berkeley Hang Gliding club, we are
focused on teaching new pilots [getting young people interested], mainly from
Univ of Cal, Berk but also for anyone that is interested.
We are working with our latest crop of students at Ed Levin on weekends; about
10 of them right now.
We have meetings every Wednesday at Raleigh's pub in Berkeley on Telegraph Ave.
Check out our fall lesson set next year [first two weekends in September], we
teach at the Berkeley marina [ some of the most fantastic views for training]. It helps spread the word on hang gliding to a diverse set people as it is a
relatively frequented place in the area.
I’m simply saying that believing propositions on bad evidence is
never a good idea. If there were sufficient reasons to believe Jesus will be
returning to earth like a superhero, this belief would form part of our
rational, scientific worldview. Of course, there are no good reasons to believe
this, but this hasn’t kept a majority of Americans from watching the skies in
the hopes that the savior the world will soon arrive. In fact, 44% of Americans
believe that Jesus will return sometime in the next fifty years.
Apocalyptic beliefs of this sort actually have political, economic, and
environmental consequences. And yet they are based purely on religious dogma. Dogmatism is dangerous because it is intrinsically divisive—these ideas aren’t
rationally held, so they can’t be rationally discussed—and it uncouples people
from the events in the world that should actually inform their beliefs. Religious dogmatism impedes medical research, starts wars, diverts scarce
material and intellectual resources—in short, it gets people killed. What most
people call “faith” (in the religious sense of the word) is nothing but a
willingness to accept religious dogma uncritically. I am definitely arguing that
we have to transcend this impulse.
But the truth is, I’m either right or wrong about Christianity, and about faith
generally. If I’m wrong, someone should be able to demonstrate this. If I’m
right, anyone who is attached to Christianity will feel uncomfortable reading my
book. There is really not much room to finesse these issues. I am hardest on
fundamentalists, but there is no question that religious liberals and moderates
are guilty of a terrific amount of wishful thinking—about God, about the world,
and even about religious fundamentalists.
There isn’t any public discourse about religion as far as I can tell. There is
only a pervasive unwillingness to offend anyone’s religious convictions. It
seems to me, however, that the stakes are now so high that we really must be
rigorously honest with ourselves. Competing religious certainties have shattered
our world, unnecessarily. And these divisions have become a perennial source of
human conflict. Religious beliefs also cause people to think badly—or not to
think at all—about questions of immense social importance.
I’ve always been an atheist in the sense that I never acquired a belief in a
personal God. But it wasn’t until September 11th, 2001—when people started
flying planes into our buildings thinking they would get to paradise, and our
own society began to further anesthetize itself with religious myths—that I
realized that I had to speak about the problem of religious faith.
There is no way around the fact that I’m advocating a certain kind of
intolerance, but it is not political intolerance. I’m not saying that people
should be jailed for their religious beliefs. I am saying, however, that certain
beliefs are so lacking in merit that there should be no question of our
“respecting” them. People who claim to be certain about things they cannot be
certain about should meet resistance in our discourse. This happens quite
naturally on every subject but religion. For instance, a person who believes
that Elvis is still alive is very unlikely to get promoted to a position of
great power and responsibility in our society. Neither will a person who
believes that the holocaust was a hoax. But people who believe equally
irrational things about God and the bible are now running our country. This is
genuinely terrifying. We must find a way of criticizing and marginalizing bad
ideas, even when they come under the cloak of religion.
Most of the people in my immediate circle already had their doubts about God. But many did not recognize the role that religion still plays as a source of
conflict in our world. It is quite amazing to read the newspaper keeping in mind
the question, “Does religion have anything to do with this…?” There are days
where literally half of the news, all of it bad, is the direct product of what
people believe about God. Many of my friends and readers seem to have grown
increasingly amazed by the mad work that religion is doing in our world.
Not only is the god hypothesis unnecessary. It is spectacularly
unparsimonious. Not only do we need no God to explain the universe and life. God
stands out in the universe as the most glaring of all superfluous sore thumbs. We cannot, of course, disprove God, just as we can't disprove Thor, fairies,
leprechauns and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. But, like those other fantasies
that we can't disprove, we can say that God is very very improbable.
Day 1: was a 44km task with very challenging conditions with only
4 pilots making goal.
Day 2: Was cancelled due to strong wind.
Day 3: This was probably the best day I have seen here for some time and if the
comp was not on it would have been a record day. The task was set to Lake
Moogera then crossing over the Great Dividing range to Millmeran with a total
distance of 194kms. Atilla won the day in 3hrs 34mins and there were 19 pilots
to make goal. There were about 30 pilots that set a personal best that day and
many more smiling faces after a great flight.
I estimate that this day we could have gone at least 500kms if we had started
four hours earlier instead of midday.
Day 4: Well another great day and the pilots are ready for another long task. We
set a dogleg task to Killarney which takes you through some of the nicest
terrain you will see in this area. We then set goal back at Millmeran to make a
total distance of 204kms. I was lucky enough to win the day in 4 hrs 15 minutes
and Steve Moyes was just behind me. We had a lot more personal bests again today
with over 20 pilots in goal. I think the drivers are starting to wear thin after
some long days.
Day 5: Back to the Tamborine launch so no more distance for us. Another dogleg
of 78kms was called with goal at lake Moogerah. It was a hard day and many of
the top pilots did not make goal however there were still 11 pilots in goal. I
won the day again with Dave Seib 6 seconds behind me. Ricky, Moyes. Atilla and
Scott did not make goal.
We are using the Fixed Total Validity scoring system and we will be using
this for all the Australian comps this year.
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The Oz Report, a near-daily, world wide hang gliding news ezine, with reports on competitions, pilot rankings, political issues, fly-ins, the latest technology, ultralight sailplanes, reader feedback and anything else from within the global HG community worthy of coverage. Hang gliding, paragliding, hang gliders, paragliders, aerotowing, hang glide, paraglide, platform towing, competitions, fly-ins. Hang gliding and paragliding news from around the world, by Davis Straub.
