cats_five & Caractacus
I see what you mean about Gliding club politics and that is part of my reason for steering clear of gliding.
One incident really summed it up for me a few years back.......... Quite late one Friday night the chief engineer of a gliding club called me, he had been working late to get a Robin tug ready for a comp that the club was running and had disturbed some flying controls that needed a duplicate inspection from another licenced engineer. He asked me if I could go do the inspection on Saturday morning so that the club had all the tugs avalable first thing.
So as the guy had helped me out in the past I showed up as requested first thing on the Saturday, as I walked into the hangar I was greeted by some bloke who in his best Anglo-Saxon told me that the club was private and that I should as he put it efff off.......... No "excuse me this is private" or other such polite requests for a stranger not to bein the clubs hangar, just a stream of abuse.
As you might guess I was half way across the car park before this idiot was told that he had in effect grounded a tug for the weekend and that he needed to catch me and eat a lot of humble pie if the rest of the club was not to find out why they were one tug down.
If this was one isolated incident I would have brushed it off but it is not, I wish I could say more about the latest incident but it might yet end up in the courts so I had better not say anything.
The thing that really gets to me is that what little gliding I have done indicates that it is a really fun sport, I just can't understand why these people have to play politics rather than enjoying the flying?
I have never encountered anything like this in other forms of aviation.