Southern Arizona Hang Glider AssociationHopefully, that subject line grabbed your attention.
Which sites will close? Well, in AZ alone it will be:
A-Mountain
Ak Chin Airport
Apache Maid
Box Canyon
Cottonwood Airport
Echo Cliffs
Humboldt Mountain
Miller Canyon
Mingus Mountain
Mount Lemmon
Mt. Eldon
Oatman Mountain
Shaw Butte
South Mountain
Whetstone Mountains
Most of the sites you're likely to fly in other states will also close including:
Woodrat Mountain
Point of the Mountain
Horse Canyon
Elings Park (Santa Barbara training hill)
Santa Barbara mountain sites and LZs
Crestline
For SAHGA, that means we'll be left with Mustang and towing.
Want to help keep our insured sites open? Then, please donate toward the capitalization of the USHPA RRG. Details are here: https://www.ushpa.aero/freeflightforever.asp. If every USHPA member donated $100, we would be done raising funds and could get on with issuing insurance policies to keep our sites open. But, right now, the donation rate in AZ is maddeningly low at 8%. That means only 17 of Arizona's 206 USHPA members have donated anything thus far.
I know we've all been busy with the holidays, but seriously, if you can afford a wing, you can afford $100 toward funding the RRG that will keep our sites open. Think of it as a one-time assessment on your USHPA membership, one that happens to be tax deductible.
Here's a spreadsheet showing the percentages by state. Right now, we're toward the bottom. This sheet gets updated as new donations roll in. https://www.dropbox.com/s/jpfwqhe4vdis5 ... g.xls?dl=0
If you have questions about all this, please go to https://www.ushpa.aero/freeflightforever.asp. If, after reading the materials there, you still have questions, please post them here or contact me privately.
Remember, USHPA cannot issue insurance policies or certificates until the RRG is properly capitalized, and our current policies expire March 1, 2016.
Insured Sites will Close March 1, 2016
Moderators:ioan, John Wolfe, aaroncromer, jlowery
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John Wolfe
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John Wolfe
- Posts:996
- Joined:Fri Aug 12, 2005 6:08 pm
- Location:Oro Valley (NW Tucson)
Re: Insured Sites will Close March 1, 2016
From James Bradley:
I guess I don’t sound as credible as Mark Forbes. Yes, we are all affected. The insurance company is explicitly unwilling to renew any part of our coverage independently from any other part. It’s not an option to, say, keep our site and individual pilot liability coverages as before, and let the commercial folks fend for themselves. Yes, we asked. ALL OF IT IS GETTING CANCELLED.
Significant claims have resulted from damage done by individual pilots flying solo, not only from commercial tandems and instruction. I have not seen the details myself.
We would dearly love to release ALL of the accident and claim data publicly. Our legal advice believes that doing so would inspire the many opportunistic attorneys in the US to file new claims. It’s another side effect of the state of legal liability in the US. Even bad claims cost money to defend.
We understand that, and we really don’t like it. There might be no subject more discussed among USHPA’s volunteer board of directors* than this, at least on days when there is no insurance crisis.
It is possible that our new ability to contest frivolous claims will help. The insurance company has settled these as a matter of policy in the past, to our great dismay. Quick settlements have made us look like an easy mark, a place where a lawyer can reliably make $10,000 or $20,000 for just a few hours of work, on a case that would never win in court.
We are releasing everything we can get our attorney to approve. We are going online with a new accident reporting system that should at least let us publish the accident reports with enough detail for pilots to learn from them. Any associated legal activity will, for now, not be published except in disappointing summaries. No one is happy about this. We understand why you would like to see it. I would too.
Under the new system insurance rates will indeed be adjusted. Commercial operations that cause more claims will pay more. Bigger schools with more student hours and flights—and therefore more legal exposure—will pay more than less busy schools. The past cannot be changed, but going forward will be different.
All of you who are interested in the details, please take the time to read the FAQ (scroll down on this page) before posting. The FAQ is written by Mark Forbes. It will get another major update in the next couple of days, answering more questions we have received and clarifying some things that weren’t clear. If you read it this weekend after the update and still have questions, please post again and I’ll try to get more answers.
* It might be worth saying again that USHPA’s board of directors is made up of pilots just like you and me, who volunteer their time to try to help things work better. A few other ragtag volunteers like me also work on things. Some of us have relevant professional experience, and many of us don’t.
This is who “they” is, when you hear people who have never tried to help say “They this” and “They that”. Please think of this when you hear people voicing suspicions about things. There are, actually, no evil characters in the room, just pilots who, like you, want the least amount of regulation that will keep our students reasonably safe, our sites open and the FAA off our backs.
I guess I don’t sound as credible as Mark Forbes. Yes, we are all affected. The insurance company is explicitly unwilling to renew any part of our coverage independently from any other part. It’s not an option to, say, keep our site and individual pilot liability coverages as before, and let the commercial folks fend for themselves. Yes, we asked. ALL OF IT IS GETTING CANCELLED.
Significant claims have resulted from damage done by individual pilots flying solo, not only from commercial tandems and instruction. I have not seen the details myself.
We would dearly love to release ALL of the accident and claim data publicly. Our legal advice believes that doing so would inspire the many opportunistic attorneys in the US to file new claims. It’s another side effect of the state of legal liability in the US. Even bad claims cost money to defend.
We understand that, and we really don’t like it. There might be no subject more discussed among USHPA’s volunteer board of directors* than this, at least on days when there is no insurance crisis.
It is possible that our new ability to contest frivolous claims will help. The insurance company has settled these as a matter of policy in the past, to our great dismay. Quick settlements have made us look like an easy mark, a place where a lawyer can reliably make $10,000 or $20,000 for just a few hours of work, on a case that would never win in court.
We are releasing everything we can get our attorney to approve. We are going online with a new accident reporting system that should at least let us publish the accident reports with enough detail for pilots to learn from them. Any associated legal activity will, for now, not be published except in disappointing summaries. No one is happy about this. We understand why you would like to see it. I would too.
Under the new system insurance rates will indeed be adjusted. Commercial operations that cause more claims will pay more. Bigger schools with more student hours and flights—and therefore more legal exposure—will pay more than less busy schools. The past cannot be changed, but going forward will be different.
All of you who are interested in the details, please take the time to read the FAQ (scroll down on this page) before posting. The FAQ is written by Mark Forbes. It will get another major update in the next couple of days, answering more questions we have received and clarifying some things that weren’t clear. If you read it this weekend after the update and still have questions, please post again and I’ll try to get more answers.
* It might be worth saying again that USHPA’s board of directors is made up of pilots just like you and me, who volunteer their time to try to help things work better. A few other ragtag volunteers like me also work on things. Some of us have relevant professional experience, and many of us don’t.
This is who “they” is, when you hear people who have never tried to help say “They this” and “They that”. Please think of this when you hear people voicing suspicions about things. There are, actually, no evil characters in the room, just pilots who, like you, want the least amount of regulation that will keep our students reasonably safe, our sites open and the FAA off our backs.