Editor's comments

Abstract

Editor’s comments

Information is given on the next page about the OSTIV activities at the Soaring Society of America Conference, 26 - 29 January 2011 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania USA.  So mark you calendars and, if possible, attend!

This issue continues the publication of papers submitted to and presented at the recent OSTIV Congress in Szeged Hungary.  Polyánszky and Bondor identify the atmospheric conditions and model those conditions that lead to the formation of weak tornados, the type that might be a hazard to glider operations.  Baardman and Mertnia have designed a novel inter-glider communications system that uses the emerging wireless technology.  Lastly, Tokgözlü and Aslan utilize sophisticated statistical techniques to model meteorological and climatological data to investigate long-range predictions of thermals in Turkey.

Also, this issue contains one contributed paper.  Warshaw presents the results of a useful study to develop a means of pilot self-assessment for the effects of aging and to determine whether those who self-certify their medical fitness to fly sailplanes (permitted in the USA) are less fit than those who are required to undergo medical certification. 

The following persons located the reviewers and supervised the reviews of the papers in this issue:     Associate Editor Ian Oldaker (Warshaw paper), Associate Editor Zafer Aslan (Polyánszky and Bondor paper), Associate Editor Helmut Fendt (Baardman and Mertina paper) and Editor Ward Hindman (Tokgözlü and Aslan paper).  To assure accuracy of the published manuscripts, each senior author received a ‘galley-proof’ for corrections-only prior to publication.  I applaud the team that produced this issue on time: associate editors, peer-reviewers, authors, copy-editor/layout person, printers and distributors.  Thank you! 

You are invited to send me comments on papers so a useful dialogue with the author(s) can occur in Technical Soaring.  Guidelines for comments can be found on the Technical Soaring website at journals.sfu.ca/ts/. 

Finally, back-issues, from Vol. 33, No. 3 (October-December 2009) to the current issue, are online at journals.sfu.ca/ts/; earlier issues will be put online as possible.  Initially, this archiving campaign will be straightforward back through Vol. 30 (2006) because the issues are in digital form.  Then, the campaign becomes more demanding.  Earlier issues are only in hard-copy form and will have to be scanned into .pdf files and uploaded.  Additionally, the titles, authors and abstracts will have to be scanned into text files using Optical Character Recognition techniques and uploaded.  I need two OSTIV members to work with me on the scanning and uploading.  If you are interested, please contact me.  Upon successful completion of the archiving campaign, a rich source of knowledge about the science, technology and operations of motorless aviation will be available online for researching.   

Ward Hindman

OSTIV Chief Editor and Technical Soaring Editor

hindman@sci.ccny.cuny.edu, www.ostiv.fai.org (editor), journals.sfu.ca/ts/