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Some other points that are noteworthy and could be helpful:
– Flying with a radio is not required by the CSS, but during fire season its a good idea to have one so that clear communication can help with the situation. We use different frequencies between groups of pilots, totally normal to minimize heavy chatter. Its a good idea that you share with someone outside of your group what freq you are on in case we have to send out comms related to fires or any other safety related event. There is also a big whiteboard in the LZ, you can write your frequency in use on that board and how many pilots are on it for that flying day (this a good idea for many other safety reasons besides just fires).
– The regular CSS club members and all of the students who learn at CSS have a solid foundation in club rules, big thanks to our resident Instructors who make sure all our P1/H1 students are taught this from the get-go. While the Club Rules are on the website, on the poster in the LZ, and on the trifold pamphlets in the LZ… it appears that some visiting pilots still don’t get the word. Lets all do what we can to make are pilots are aware of our safety rules and procedures (to include the approach patterns and the White X, this are really our two biggest rules).
– CSS membership is REQUIRED to land at AJX and use club facilities. There are multiple people who have flown our site without being, at the very least, even temporary members. This behavior is disrespectful to the founders of the club, people who have put in countless hours over many years improving and maintaining the club, to the volunteers who run current club operations, but perhaps most immediately it is disrespectful to all of the Club Members who maintain a current paid membership. It takes money to operate our club, maintain the facilities, and pay our insurance premiums. Luckily, that total dollar cost annually shared between our active members makes the individual contribution each year a very low dollar amount. Anyone who ‘pirates’ the privilege to fly at CSS/AJX is doing a disservice to the people who made it possible for us enjoy this site for the last 30 years and to our current members, also putting our club at risk if something bad were to happen.
Reminder to CSS Members:
IT IS FIRE SEASON, events like this are going to happen and unfortunately it may interrupt our recreational flying. Here are some points we need to remind ourselves of and we must also make sure visiting pilots are aware of;
– the White X means LAND NOW, DO NOT LAUNCH. NO EXCEPTIONS.
– An official TFR is NOT required for the club to make the call to put out the White X. To my knowledge there still is no TFR posted for the Summit Fire. We make the call to deploy the White X (most often) based on air traffic in the area. The fire may not be within 5 miles of the LZ or the launches, but CALFIRE and other agencies have and will fly through the area multiple times.
– The CSS has to be an active partner with CALFIRE and other agencies to ensure the safety of their pilots and aircraft, our pilots, and the safety of people on the ground who may be endangered by the fire that the emergency services are trying to fight. We cannot and WILL NOT be a hinderance to firefighting efforts.
– Typically, not always, the call to deploy the White X will made by CSS Board members who are present and or/our local Instructors. If none of the above mentioned people are on-site, the call can and should be made by experienced and knowledgeable pilots who are regular CSS members. It is a very rare occurrence that none of three categories of pilots mentioned here are not present on a flyable day.
– DO NOT question or argue with the call made to deploy the White X. A TFR is not not the minimum ‘requirement’ for the White X. We know that it’s very disappointing to have cease our flying activity when a fire fighting effort is underway, but arguing the deployment of safety precautions does not help the situation. Yesterday was a very clear situation with roughly 6 aircraft involved and making multiple runs. It was a straight forward situation with a clear outcome.
Club Issues that warrant a reminder to Club Members (continued)
The other three pilots who launched Regionals AFTER the White X was deployed, however, flew along the front ridge in excess of 2 hours and made no attempts to descend and land. CSS Board members and other pilots in the LZ continued to observe multiple firefighting aircraft pass through the airspace during that time, although there were no close calls.
As noted above, the White X was cleared from the LZ at 1820 and the three pilots still aloft landed between 1840-1900.
The first pilot to land was found not to be an active club member. He may have had a membership in the past but did not have a current club membership. That pilot was asked not return to CSS/AJX until 01 October for any flying and that he must have an active membership to fly our site. It goes without saying that he got an education on what the White X means as well why its important to maintain a current club membership.
The second two pilots landed were active club members, but both didn’t understand what the white X meant. They were both directed to review the club rules that posted on the CSS website as well as on a GIANT color poster displayed in the LZ. Both pilots were asked to take a break from flying at CSS/AJX for the next weekend and may return to flying at our site on the weekend of 7-8 SEP.
Club Issues that warrant a reminder to Club Members.
Several pilots had launched from Regionals and the 750 just prior to the White X being deployed on the LZ and quickly gained altitude in buoyant conditions. Three other pilots pilots were observed launching from Regionals AFTER the White X was on the LZ.
Radio calls were made on know frequencies the pilots were monitoring. Several of the pilots pulled big-ears and made ever effort to land as quickly as possible, and that was a hard thing to do based on conditions. It may have taken up to 20 minutes or maybe a bit more for some pilots to descend and land, but utilizing several techniques for immediate descent they were able to get down as quickly as reasonably possible. I spoke to those pilots personally and thanked them for their active efforts to get down as quick as they could.
John, it appears you are confusing loyalty to individuals vs. leadership. Please don’t put words in my mouth… I spoke with every single HG pilot in the club to campaign for a change in board leadership during a regular cycle BOD election… it was not to vote Dan out, just to vote for a different group (you used the word ‘recall’ in your post above, and that vote was at a later date for specific circumstances and did not involve membership, it was a BOD decision and it wasn’t made lightly). Dan was my Instructor and Gene was my friend… do you actually think I, or anyone, took any pleasure in the actions we had to take? Do you think we just ignored or forgot the contributions of both individuals? So I’ll just reiterate what I said before, a significant set of circumstances were present and we were forced to take action while also not trying to publicly humiliate anyone. The simple fact is, and it appears this has happened many times in the past, some people who give a lot to the club later develop a sense of entitlement and do things that wouldn’t be tolerated from any other member. It happened… it happened a lot. We aren’t giving preferential treatment anyone, ourselves included and we aren’t going to let anyone walk over the club because they feel like they are above the rules and beyond reproach.
Honestly John I’m pretty shocked, considering your background, that you would make comments about leadership without knowing the big picture. You have no idea how many times this club came danger-close to being in real trouble that would risk our lease with DWR because of the actions of a few. Maybe if you did then you’d actually be thankful there are fully-formed adults managing the business of the club.
And BTW… Jamie has put in a mind-numbing amount of hours dealing with insurance issues and ultimately got on us on a path to having the right type of insurance that the DWR approves of while also not forcing the Instructors to pay RRRG thier extortion rates. She has had to deal with State Officials (the slow grind of that wheel), as well trying to negotiate issues with USHPA, the RRRG, and some downright offensive and belligerent executives at our previous commercial insurance provider. I’m sure there are numerous people in the club who would have offered to help with type of work but I can promise you that no one we have is better equipped to have managed it as diplomatically and as strategically than Jamie did. Also… I shouldn’t have to bring this up, but as an HG pilot you should know how long Jamie has been involved with organizing Comps and keeping the sport going. So if you are going to insult her leadership ability without knowing the facts, that says way more about you than it does about any of us.
John, we never asked any members to recall anyone. We wanted members to vote for a board that wouldn’t do harm to the club. It took more than a year to recover from the damage that was caused by the site insurance issue. If you want to know more about it, you could have attend BOD meetings or read the meeting minutes.
In terms of how we handle issues with like Site-Bans and the removal of Board Members… The findings are made public for transparency reasons, however in general we maintain some sense of privacy for those involved. In short, we are not airing dirty laundry or dragging people through the mud. You are obviously not informed about the total picture of circumstances.
By calories I am assuming you mean how much skin some of the board members have in the game? You have no idea of how much work has been done behind the scenes by board members. Putting up with gossip, speculation, immaturity, and sense of entitlement by a loud minority of members accounts for 95% of the stress we put up with when we all have full-time jobs/families/priorities etc. outside of club board responsibilities.
I don’t think so, Owen is out of town this weekend.
I’m not sure if you are joking Tom… but just in case you weren’t: The XC Ranch was not donated to the CSS, the ranch became its own Not For Profit entity and the land was donated to that.
Thanks to Albert and Yaroslav for driving up to Marshall with me so we could install the WX station & change the windsock. Big thanks to David Webb for the logistics to procure the new equipment and then providing phone tech support and system validation. Also thanks to Ken to our letting us drive him up to launch using his truck so we could bring the 24 ft ladder on his roof rack. Fingers crossed we can get another WX station to replace the Crestline unit soon.
The above photo was taken Saturday, May 25th after mowing. Gopher activity is at a minimum and restricted to North edge of the grass by the road.
The obvious sore spot is the big yellow area close to the PG Kiting corner. A huge thanks is owed to Owen Morse for helping troubleshoot the issues he found and resolved with the irrigation system. We discovered an error in the program for Zone 4 and corrected it. Zone 4 covers that area that is yellow and while it was functioning (kind of), it was only spraying that area for about one minute every night the program was running. We had a really wet winter and spring, but now that excess moisture in the soil has been depleted and we are seeing the effect. With the fix done to the program cycle Zone 4 should now get a full 15 minutes of water when the program runs every night. Hopefully we will see improvement within a week to 10 days.
Owen, Jamie, and I also replaced a few damaged solenoids to correct issues with Zones 5 & 6. Several other sprinklers have been replaced due to damage (at least 5) and about 10 sprinklers have had improvements made to the spray pattern so we aren’t wasting water over the edge into the weeds and keeping it on the grass. Two weeks ago Owen discovered that Zone 1 (the far Southeast corner), wasn’t even running in the program. Since that was corrected we already see the green level back to normal in that area.
In Zone 9, the sprinkler that is closest to the Pavillion in the corner by the road, has been adjusted so that it tracks from the front edge of the turf over to the road edge – it won’t be spraying into the corner of the Pavillion anymore!
Pic taken Friday, 10 May 2024.
Our Gopher Control professionals will be on-site for the 4th visit on Wednesday, 13 March. They have done outstanding work in drastically reducing the burrowing rodent population, the efficacy is apparent when you look across the LZ and don’t see any visible gopher mounds.
The Spring pupping season for the little bastards continues through the end of May, so we plan to have the Gopher Champs team continue their work for 2 to 4 more visits. The cost for these visits is significantly lower than the initial treatment cost and I think membership will agree that vigilance is money well spent.Future plans for LZ care: in mid to late April we will deploy the remaining bags of fertilizer that were donated by Bill Blackman from Site One Landscape Supply. These bags are ‘post emergent’ nutrients that will help ensure good levels of soil supplements to keep the grass healthy through the hot summer. Towards late May/early June we will be spraying a liquid supplement called ‘Moisture Manager’ on areas that start to experience yellowing from heat or lower irrigation coverage. This product helps regulate moisture absorption and prevents water loss during hot weather. (It has what plants want! It has what plants need!)
The above pictures were taken after mowing on Saturday, 09 March 2024. The overall green level is looking good and Gopher activity is at a minimum. The fun fact is that we are just now arriving at the explosive growth season for the grass (after the time change = more sunlight).
a special thanks to Mario for coming out Saturday morning to knock down some weeds on the approach near the train hill, and Tim Ward for running the mower around the base of the training hill to clean up more weed growth. -
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