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"The planning and work to fill in, grade and clean up the ever growing ditch (canyon) at Parma was completed this August. The coordinated effort between club members and Santa Barbara's City Parks, along with a successful fund raising drive, has made our most popular mountain landing area. more user friendly than ever. Many thanks to City Parks and the members who contributed time and money. In mid September the city installed a sign at the entrance to Parma Park notifying park visitors about hang glider and paraglider landings. For our club the city's cooperation to help fix upper Parma and in particular this new sign is a milestone in our ongoing efforts to secure and maintain safe, convenient and lasting flying sites. Our activities are for the first time in our 25-year history "officially acknowledged" by the city in a positive way. After so many years, seeing the new sign definitely triggers a warm and fuzzy feeling. For even though Parma is still a tight landing area, it appears to be available to us for the future (unless we blow it with parking related complaints).
The fact that we have not impacted any of the ever-present Parma boulders year after year is the best proof of our ability to avoid. After these considerations, it is difficult to skew the what-ifs in a way to come up with a scenario whereupon the landing hang glider is ever a risk to the public at Parma. A paraglider with its low speed, high maneuverability and lack of a hard surface is a non-issue altogether. So if the new sign doesn't make a difference with the risk to the non flying Parma park user (because there is no risk), than the only purpose the sign serves is to illustrate to us that the city officials need to know more about hang gliding and paragliding. A useful sign would have phone numbers of local pilot/guides to further insure that visiting pilots would have no excuse to fly here without the required local escort. One might think that it should be no big deal to get the city to view our flying as we do. But even though we know how easy it is to avoid people on the ground, and we know how easy it is to avoid getting into situations where we have to avoid people on the ground, and we know how it is just as easy to avoid coming too close to people while landing at the beach, we know how to fly - they don't. We have immersed ourselves in this sport for years and they have not. We would be very fortunate to get the cities' decision-makers to understand just a portion of what we have come to know as second nature and the partial conveyance of our knowledge will only happen after lengthy presentations. If we do get what we want (which is no different than we presently have at Wilcox and have had at East Beach) it will only be after alot of political perseverance, and compromise. Whatever the future holds for us, we can look forward to more site management complications. These inevitable problems will have the potential to overwhelm us unless we work together and have the cooperation of every pilot. Everyone and anyone can help during these critical next several months. You can help by being a SBSA board or committee member. You can check out visiting pilots and determine if they are qualified, current USHGA members who know about the nuances of our sites. You can rack up loads of air time.You can solicit others to become members of the SBSA. You can support the SBSA site preservation policies and guidelines. And you can remember that it only takes one pilot to blow it for all the rest of us. Author has been landing at parma weekly since 1981 |
Although that warm and fuzzy feeling is good thing to maintain, we shouldn't get to complacent, for if we want to resume landing rights at our beaches, it is going to be a very challenging task. Our primary job is to educate the city about the scope of our activities. The officials making the decisions have told us that they know little about the difference between a hangglider and a paraglider. This isn't unusual. Ninety-five percent of the non-flying public in Santa Barbara has never seen a hangglider or paraglider up close!