Dear Delegates
A very successful Bureau meeting was held last month in Cambridge, England. My thanks to Neil Goudie, of the Cambridge Gliding Centre, for arranging excellent facilities for the meeting.
The Minutes from the meeting are available on the IGC website at http://www.fai.org/gliding/bureau2006_2 and also via a link from the IGC homepage. You will see that we have a large number of action items from the meeting.
Planning for our plenary meeting in 2007 is underway. We have confirmed our intention to provide a programme that will involve the Presidents of all national gliding organizations in discussions on the Saturday. I will be writing to all Presidents shortly to formally invite them to join us for dinner on the Friday evening and to the plenum session on the Saturday morning.
We have now completed six qualifying Grand Prix events. It is great to see that pilots who have missed qualification for 2007 are prepared to enter in another Grand Prix in order to qualify. Such is the spirit of the competition. The South African QGP and Australian QGP events will be held in December, creating more opportunities for pilots to qualify.
As a Bureau we have been concerned about the gap in Grand Prix events between January 2007 and December 2007. We are now exploring the possibility of filling this gap with a series of Grand Prix style races in the northern hemisphere summer season.
I am pleased to be able to tell you that we have reached a successful conclusion to a small problem about the naming of our Grand Prix. The use of the name “World Sailplane Grand Prix” has been disputed by other parties. To cut a long story short, we have now agreed with the FAI Executive Board that the IGC will retain the name “Sailplane Grand Prix (SGP)” to clearly identify this type of glider race. At the international level, then, Air Sports Ltd will market an event called “FAI World Series Gliding” with the SGP being the glider race used for this event.
Looking at our FAI World Gliding Championships we have decided, after being invited to visit Rieti in September to review their preparations for 2007 and 2008, that we should be more pro-active in helping WGC Organizers.
This is part of the role of the Chief Steward, but we have now decided that this role will include the Chief Steward, in company with a Bureau Member, visiting each Organizer and their WGC site six to nine months prior to a WGC. The purpose of this visit will be to see how preparations are progressing and to see what assistance we may be able to provide to them.
The FAI General Conference has just been completed in Santiago, Chile. The format of Conference was adjusted to allow time for discussion topics and to work on the organization of the 2009 World Air Games.
While in Santiago I had the opportunity, along with many others, to visit the Santiago Gliding Club. They have done something quite dramatic – they have managed to protect their gliding site and to also develop it as a “public reserve” within the city boundaries. I hope that we will be able to have members of the Club make a presentation on the Saturday morning to the 2007 Plenary meeting so that we can learn from them about the development and implementation of their very successful strategy.
The 2007 Plenary meeting will also decide the venues for the following competitions:
If your NAC is interested in bidding for any of these Championships, please contact the FAI office or Eric Mozer at emozer@deltamold.com for a bid form.
The deadline for receipt of the bid form by the IGC bid specialist and for preferred consideration for these contests is the 15th of November, 2006.
Finally, I am working with the FAI Secretary General, Max Bishop, to prepare a response to the Draft Accident Report into the fatal accident at Husbands Bosworth during the 2005 FAI Junior World Gliding Championships. The Draft Report makes sobering reading and I anticipate that the Final Report will be published prior to the 2007 Plenary meeting.
Best Regards and Safe Flying
Bob Henderson
President, IGC
October 30th, 2006