Weed Out The Cowboys Please.
I've been sailing for many years, and every now and then we get a "Cowboy" - a new skipper with a new boat, who has never sailed before, and who not only "knows everything", they have new and far superior knowledge and technique involved in every aspect of the sport.
This generally translates into two or three spectacular accidents on the race course, Six or Seven tonnes of vessel moving at about Eight knots can cause considerable damage, broken bones and even on occasion amputations. Now once these people identify themselves by their actions, they are generally "spoken to" by the elders, and agree to receive advice and instruction.
Most of them calm down and recant, and become solid citizens. But a minority don't. One gentleman, a former motor racer, would not stop deliberately colliding with other vessels and eventually every club in the Bay refused his race entry paperwork. Another one, a dear man, when not on the water, was the least safe sailor I have ever seen, and by a stroke of total and complete irony, his death a few years ago by drowning in a yacht race was the catalyst for legislative changes requiring compulsory wearing of lifejackets in certain situations in Victoria.
Now I believe, perhaps wrongly, that these cowboys don't manage to become a VH licenced pilot, they would certainly be weeded out from where I fly from, and quickly. What concerns me is that if the RAA isn't careful, it's going to become a refuge for these types, if it hasn't become one already. There is a posting about activities at Barwon Heads (and my comment) that is perhaps indicative of this type of mindset in some people.
Let me simply observe that if you do not develop a process to either reform or weed these clowns out, you are going to have a fairly short but spectacular life as an organisation. Your demise will occur through a series of lawsuits following failure by the RAA to act against an individual who has repeatedly been involved in (documented and proven) incidents and accidents and has gone on to eventually take someone's life.