Gliding clubs and demonstration flights

[vihai]

Hello,

Suppose that a stranger comes to your gliding club and ask to make a short demonstration flight to decide if he would or not start training in gliding.

Do you perform such flights?
Do you ask him to pay for the whole flight or for his fair share?

A debate is raging in Italy after ENAC (the local aviation authority) sent a letter to aeroclubs stating that only companies with an AOC and pilots with a CPL/ATPL would be enabled to perform such kind of flights.

Of course that would ban gliding flights as no AOC or CPL could be obtained but also flights performed by aeroclubs.

How are the rules in your contry?

[cats_five]

Gliding clubs in the UK can give and charge for air experience flights and trial lessons. I believe the people taking the flights sign up for a days' temporary membership which makes it all legit.

[ProfChrisReed]

Cats five has it pretty much right.

You have to be a member to fly from a BGA gliding club (which almost all UK clubs are).

If you're a non-pilot, and probably if you are a pilot with no gliding experience, the club will sell you a trial lesson.

If you're a glider pilot, then you will probably get a check flight (at club rates) and, if OK, be allowed to fly the club gliders. You will still have to become a temporary member (charging varies between clubs).

I've even known an otherwise unoccupied instructor to take visitors flying as his guest - usually attractive women, but sometime male power pilots to whom that instructor had been chatting and felt friendly. In that case, the guest paid nothing (but still had to become a temporary member).

[Fly-by-Wife]

The key word here in the UK is "lesson" - certainly for powered flying.

Thus a training organisation can sell what is in many (most?) cases effectively a pleasure flight as a "lesson", and thus does not need an AOC.

Here's an excerpt from Is my flight legal? A guide to the Air Operator’s Certificate

A ‘trial lesson’ is simply a first lesson which may or may not be followed by subsequent lessons. It follows that it is an instructional flight and should be conducted as such; and an abbreviated exercise such as ‘effects of controls’ or ‘straight and level’ should be taught. Instructional flights are not public transport, but aerial work, and are not subject to public transport regulations, so no AOC is required.

FBW

[tinpilot]

air experience flights and trial lessons.

the club will sell you a trial lesson

No no no no no nooooo.

Repeat after me: trial membership.

BGA clubs do not sell flights or lessons; that would require the same close attention from the regulator that ENAC is threatening.

The CAA has no objection to BGA clubs selling short period memberships (1 month?, 3 months?) which include one or more free flights.

[22/04]

Typically temporaray membership in the UK is three months - tax advantages!

But we have found it gives time for temporary members to get hooked

[Whopity]

In the UK the Flight Instructor rating includes a proviso that all instruction is conducted within a club of which the instructor and student are both members. This is because a "flying club" is exempt from the requirement to hold an AOC.

Very conveniently, there is no legal definition of a flying club.

[BHenderson]

(5) A glider is not flying for the purpose of public transport [AOC] for the purposes of Part 3 and Part 4 by virtue of paragraph (1) if the valuable consideration given or promised for the primary purpose of conferring on a particular person the right to fly the glider on that flight is given or promised by a member of a flying club and the glider is owned or operated by that flying club.

http://www.caa.co.uk/docs/33/CAP393.pdf Paragraph 262(5)

i.e. Must be a member of the gliding club to pay for a flight or a lesson.