Signing Off

Our annual meeting and formal board election is tonight, after which I will no longer be president, so this is a good time for an end-of-term report to the members.
Last fall I established a long range planning committee for the club. On Thursday the committee delivered recommendations to the board. The report was excellent, by the way, and well worth reading, but here is the very short version: If we want to own our own gliderport, we need to grow the club.
We reached several decisions on Thursday night:

1. The board approved another visit to Lee Bottom airport this year, the weekend of May 20 and 21. We'll take at least one tow plane and possibly one or more club sailplanes. We will also encourage the soaring club from Bardstown, Kentucky to join us there for the weekend.
   
2. The board voted to find and purchase another singleplace sailplane comparable in price, performance and user-friendliness to a Grob 102. After that, we will (probably) wait and see if people fly the PW-5 enough to justify keeping it in the club fleet.
   
3. CISS will start having regular membership meetings every other month, instead of every month as has been the practice. After the annual meeting and banquet tonight, we will have our next regular club meeting on March 16.
   
4. The safety meeting will be on March 18. Weather and time permitting, we will fly that day and probably Sunday the 19th. We ask anyone who will need a BFR this year to try to get it done that weekend or the next, and we encourage everyone to take their first flight of the season with a CFIG.
5. The regular crew schedule for 2006 will start the weekend of March 25 and 26 and end the weekend of October 28 and 29, so that every crew gets the same number of days.
   
6. Since we changed from Schweizer 2-33's to Blanik L-23's a few year ago, club practice has been not to retract the landing gear during instructional flights. There was some confusion over whether there was a formal club policy against the use of the retractable gear at all. In fact, there is no such policy; pilots can decide for themselves whether to retract the gear - as long as they remember to extend it for landing! Chief Instructor Nyal Williams recommended that we instruct all of our members, including student pilots, in the routine use of the retractable gear in the future. The board didn't take any formal action because we leave flight instruction to the instructors and flying to the pilots.