Need for regulation
As sympathetic as I am to the view of Henri Mignet (the air is an ocean that comes to every man's door and he has a right to set sail on it) we *are* going to have some government regulation of our aviation activities.
The proper debate is what form this will take and how it is administered.
The moral case for regulation is in the first place that there are innocent third parties on the ground who want nothing to do with aviation and a good number of whom probably think aircraft are inventions of the Devil.
They have a right that some steps be taken to make the probability of an aircraft falling on their heads so low as to disappear into noise floor of the other everyday risks that everyone takes. If they choose to move next to an established airport they can be assumed to voluntarily take on the slightly higher risk.
Those of us who fly will all agree that there need to be some "rules of the air" so that we know who gives way, what to do arriving and departing from airports etc.
In the case of sport aviation we all know the activity is dangerous but this isn't an excuse to make it unnecessarily so by failing to carry out simple commonsense procedures like visually checking above and behind before launching a glider. This is especially important at gliding operations where the aircraft have no go round capability and a landing glider has no choice *but* to land and at low altitudes a very limited choice of where.
It is also fairly obviously undesirable for accidents where an organisation is involved, to have the organisation itself provide the bulk of any investigation.
In my experience the GFA is a heavily rules based organisation but actual on field operations use little common sense and there seems to be in most cases little concept of the sanctity of an active runway. It isn't for parking gliders or towplanes on (especially where aircraft have no go round capability).
There are other routine things done like making the aerotow launch point 100 to 150 meters up the runway from the threshold in order that gliders may land behind it and avoid lots of ground handling. All very nice until you have a rope break/uncommanded release/towplane engine failure shortly after takeoff where that extra unused runway behind may make the difference between a good recovery from the emergency and disaster.
There are other GFA SOPs that bear looking into by outside professional aviators to see whether they can be done better and whether some practice emergencies are better done by briefing and discussion rather than by creating real ones accidently during practice.
It is no wonder that the accident rate is so bad.
To get back to the discussion at hand I'll re-iterate that the GFA operates under a self ADMINISTRATION not self regulation model. While the GFA may make the rules CASA reserves the right to approve them or otherwise. To make the relationship quite clear the GFA receives currently about $150,000 per year from CASA to administer gliding on CASA's behalf. The GFA is a bought and paid for sub-contractor.
In return, CASA forces anyone wishing to fly gliders to join the GFA and a gliding club (you also get to join a State Association as part of this). Gliding clubs may be your cup of tea if you are comfortable with the ambiance and efficiency of a poorly run Soviet era collective farm.
Don't look for any change from GFA or CASA here.
Nowadays there are many self launching sailplanes on the market (as distinct from the so called "travelling motor gliders" which are high L/D powered aircraft where the Flight Manual allows you to turn the engine off in flight) and there are people with PPLs or higher who may wish to buy same and operate from a nearby public or private aerodrome which doesn't have a gliding operation. This is very difficult to do as several people I know have found out. Simply getting approved to operate by the GFA requires 200 hours "under supervision" no matter how many hours you have in powered aircraft.
The ridiculous extreme was a bloke who, with a partner built a two seat homebuilt travelling type motor glider and was told by the GFA that, no, he couldn't do the test flying until he got 200 hours gliding under supervision despite the fact that he had 25,000 hours and was once a military test pilot.
Over the last 10 years or so the GFA and CASA have colluded to make flying gliders or motorgliders on a PPL, impossible. It helps to know that some of the CASA people involved in this were enthusiastic GFA supporters.
In any case the gliding problem is a self limiting one. The GFA is half the size it was in 1983-84 (the population of Australia has increased by more than 50% since so it is worse than it looks) and the average age of GFA members must be around 60. Give it ten years and you'll be able to pick up a glider really cheap.
Pity really. Gliding is a lovely activity with a 100 year, mostly honorable, history . Sport for *pilots* and a technological activity that has produced beatiful and efficient aircraft.
It could be turned around fairly easily but the destruction of the GFA/CASA collusion as it currently exists is necessary.