President's Letter to Delegates and Committee Chairmen 2009-4

2nd September 2009

IGC Bureau Meeting

Dear Friends The Bureau has just concluded the mid-year meeting in Lausanne. This has been a very effective meeting covering - in addition to normal business - safety, the IGC communications profile, and a review of the GP programme. The Minutes will be available shortly on the IGC website. In the meantime I want to tell you about some of the decisions we have made:

Pilot Decision-Making

We have recently had some bad accidents in IGC sanctioned competitions. We have to address this trend and we are developing a short video to challenge pilots to think about their personal decision-making.

This video will be launched at the Plenary meeting in March next year.

Survivability and Injury Mitigation

We have all become increasingly concerned about improving survivability and reducing the severity of injuries for all pilots in the event of an accident. We have had extensive discussions now with agents of the glider manufacturers and we are now developing a three-pronged attack on survivability:

• Education – about what is being done; how to use the existing equipment appropriately; understanding the risks created by some activities; etc
• Installations – arming our Chief Stewards with the knowledge to know what to look for in the cockpit to reduce injury risk; enabling the availability of simple items which are known to help reduce injury; etc
• Development – understanding what OSTIV and the Manufacturers are doing and working with them to develop solutions to make our sport safer.

Annex A

We have resolved to adopt the updated Annex A - which is being provided to you as a Year Two proposal at the 2010 Plenary – with effect from the 1st of APRIL 2010.

The Bureau wish to have the effective date of Annex A moved to the start of the Northern Hemisphere soaring season so that we can use the updated Rules for the World Championships scheduled in 2010.

This proposal will require a 2/3rds majority vote to enable us to make this change.

Oversubscription of Entries

You will remember a somewhat complicated debate in March about how to manage the number of entries in an IGC sanctioned championships if there were too many preliminary registrations.

We have created what we believe is a simple and fair process now and will be endorsing this to you for adoption with effect from the 1st of APRIL 2010 to enable the process to be used for the Championships in 2010.

The process is detailed in a separate Newsletter.

Communication – getting the messages out there

There are some 450 people registered on “igc-discuss” and another 250 on “igc-news” – our two general email channels aside from the Delegates address list.

So – we are currently only reaching one-half a percent (0.5%) of all known glider pilots!

The various gliding magazines help, but information carried there is dated by the time of publication.

We need to be doing better and we are going to start linking diverse tools like the website and the Ranking List with text messaging (SMS) and twitter to create a better information network. You-Tube and Facebook will also form part of this network, with the plan being to create dedicated gliding areas on these tools.

Finally - a Call for Bids for the 2010 Plenary Meeting

Remember that hosts for the following competitions will be allocated at the 2010 IGC Plenary meeting in Lausanne:

• 2013 FAI Women’s World Gliding Championships
• 2013 FAI Junior World Gliding Championships
• 2011 Grand Prix Gliding Final

Additionally we are taking bids for the 2010 and 2011 Qualifying Grand Prix events.

Please forward this request to your NAC. For further information and a bid application form for any of these events, please contact Eric Mozer (emozer@deltamold.com). The deadline for intent to bid and receipt of preliminary application forms is September 30, 2009.

Best regards
Bob Henderson
President, IGC
2nd September 2009