Table of Contents

Captain

Firstly, I’ll tell you what the main responsibilities of the Captain are, and then I’ll try to explain what he or she does on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis.

Firstly, the Captain takes overall responsibility for the day-to-day running of the club – It’s your name on the form if anything goes wrong! You’re also the central point of contact for everyone involved with the club – students, ex-students, Lasham, the Union, the BGA and anyone else we deal with – The Captain needs to know about everything that’s going on in the club. The third main responsibility of the Captain is to supervise the rest of the committee, delegating appropriate tasks to them and teaching them how icGC is run that they can handle more responsibility and take over when you’re away.

In practice, the kind of things I have to do include:

• Answering prospective members’ questions and booking trial flights; motivating members to fly and organising weekend trips to Lasham.
• Updating union paperwork such inventories, instructor registrations and most importantly, the annual budget.
• Working with the honorary president, Afandi Darlington, to sort out any major problems arising and plan for the long term.
• Writing short articles for Felix and Sailplane & Gliding Magazine
• Writing tour proposals and Grant applications and organising tours for the vacations.
• Working with other committee members to check a particular area of the club is running smoothly
• Answering day-to-day queries about the club and dealing with other tasks too small to mention.

Being Captain is demanding and will take up a lot of your time. When you first take over, the learning curve is very steep – It’s hard work but you’ll learn much of what you need to be successful in the first few weeks if you stick at it. Like any of the committee positions, the only real qualification required is enthusiasm, but good communication skills, an ability to manage your time effectively and some experience of how icGC is organised really help! Standing for Captain is not something you should do lightly, but if you are elected then there are plenty of people prepared to help you out in every way possible – usually all you have it do is ask!

To summarise, being Captain isn’t easy, but it is incredibly rewarding, it teaches you a lot about gliding, yourself and other people.

Any questions about this just ask!

Vice Captain

Vice-Captain of icGC has three main responsibilities, the first of which involves the administration of memberships. That is to maintain a database of all the members, their gliding experience and contact details. This takes time at the beginning of the season with all the new memberships and renewals, but then requires relatively little work for the rest of the year. This job also means you get to know everyone’s names in the club, which helps when you’re on the committee!

The second responsibility of the Vice-Captain is as an ‘events manager’. We do run several social events over the year from informal nights at the union up to the annual formal dinner and these events normally require some organisation. This is the part of the job I really enjoyed as it really improves personal organisational ability and I learnt a lot of lessons in the process. The amount of events really depends on the club as a whole, but generally if you advertise anything to the list you will get some response, it just requires someone to come up with the ideas in the first place. The most important events are the Annual Dinner and the trailer washing for RAG week, which both require planning well in advance. It’s a fantastic feeling when your events do go well and everyone has a great time!

The third responsibility is the buying and selling of icGC merchandise, i.e. the fleeces and polo shirts you see everyone wearing. This takes little time and has a great influence on advertising the club. In addition to these responsibilities, as a member of the committee you will be required to support the rest of the committee with the day to day running of the club and its promotion for the benefit of the club as a whole. Overall the role of Vice-Captain is a great way of being on the committee and is both very rewarding and lots of fun!

Treasurer

The Treasurer is (supposedly) responsible for all things financial in relation to the club, and as such is one of the most important roles in the club bar chair.

Basically, it involves banking money, paying people, ensuring that people have paid, writing the club budget, and being tactful with how to spend the club’s budget. Now, in more detail.

Being Treasurer is a lot of work at the start of the year – often I found myself spending an afternoon a week simply organising paperwork and making trips to the bank, from the sheer amount of money passing into the club from new members, trial flights, minibuses, etc. So it’s important that you keep on top of the workload, and bank everything immediately. It takes about 2 months for that workload to calm down a bit, and from then on you’ll mostly be dealing with paying invoices out of our budget for absolutely everything we do from fleeces to CofA’s.

There is a weekly Treasurer’s meeting that you need to attend if you want anything to be paid for. You’ll need to attend most of these, as usually there is something that needs doing every week. You’ll also need to attend a termly RCC meeting.

Apart from running the club’s day-to-day finances, the Treasurer also has the responsibility for writing the club’s budget for the following year, along with the club Captain.

As long as you can add up, and are prepared to put in the time every single week, being Treasurer is not actually that hard a job. You’ll need motivation, as no-one will really notice you unless you screw up! The job is personally rewarding, and teaches you a lot about how icGC works, bringing you closer to it by being a very important member of the committee team. You’ll get a lot of support from the rest of the committee, and in turn support all their roles – so it’s really not that bad!

If you’re up for it, but want to know more, please feel free to get in touch and have a chat!

Equipment Officer

So, it’s that time of year again where we all tell you what our job’s entail in the hope to convince some poor bugger to do them instead next year!

You may, or may not, know that your Equipment Officer this year has been me – and you may or may not know what that means, so here’s an attempt at describing it!

Being Equipment Officer basically means that you are responsible for looking after and maintaining a fleet consisting of a Grob 103C, Discus B and ASW 24. This means that if anything goes wrong with them (and it invariably does in a student club), you need to act fast and carefully in order to get them back in the air again at minimal cost. You’re also responsible for the more regular line of work connected with owning a glider – organising the annual “Certificate of Airworthiness” check (like a car’s MOT) mainly, but there’s also stuff like parachute repacking to be done.

As Equipment Officer this year, to give you a taster, here’s a list of things I can remember doing!:

• Certificate of Airworthiness on the 2 seater – you need to choose the professional to do it, and arrange to get the aircraft de-rigged and taken there, and re-rigged and returned. This year I have had extensive work done to ‘496’, therefore this also involved the writing of a successful Harlington Trust application (for the new wing tips) and the selection of the Cambridge 300 series Navigation Computer suite you will find now in the cockpits. This isn’t that regular, but you will certainly have some aspect of improving something / buying something new.
• Certificate of Airworthiness on the single seaters – these are done by ourselves to minimise costs, and you’ll need to arrange the inspectors to do it, and suitably keen student members to help out with the monkey work!
• Parachute repacks – easy, you just tell Lasham!
• Caravan overhaul – icGC shares a caravan at Lasham that we can stay in, we’re slowly getting it kitted out with modern services – like water and electricity.
• Maintaining glider equipment: If something goes wrong, breaks, or just becomes too worn out, or you notice we don’t have something we should have, then you need to use your initiative to fill that gap. Things will certainly break, they do every year – it’s your job to get it fixed again!
• Maintaining trailers – these need to be kept in tip-top roadworthy condition, or those trailing for you won’t be too happy! Replacing a tyre blow out (that happened to me actually) was one such job.
• Radio Licenses – our radio’s require CAA licenses, renewed annually.
• Writing websites: this one for a start! Not technically your job though.

So, as you can see, the job isn’t actually that much work – it’s certainly a lot less regular work than the equally important role of Treasurer (having done both myself), but the batches of work are much larger. I’d say that this was the only role that involves a good technical knowledge of gliders and gliding. That’s not a huge level of knowledge, but you should at least know what the glider’s bits are, and the support equipment. Moreover, initiative is required and enthusiasm to get something sorted! Or it’ll just sit there rotting if you don’t. You need to be a keen glider pilot, simply because you will need to be able to be at Lasham at least once a month really in order to get things done – all your work is at the airfield nearly.

I think Equipment Officer is definitely a good role to have! It’s one of the top 3 most important jobs in the club (we are, after all, useless without our aeroplanes!), and you’ll have more excuses to go to Lasham – and to fly! You’ll learn a lot about the technical aspects of gliders, and a lot about the running of this club. It’s not really that much work, but you will need dedication when the work comes up – no-one will remind you, you need to be organised.

That’s my bit then – it’s really a good interesting varied job to have, if you’re dedicated and into gliding big time, give this a go!

Any questions, just ask me!

Secretary

It is an excellent position on the committee for someone who wants to give something back to the club and wants an introduction into how the club is run.

The main roles are:

1. Taking and copying up minuites
2. Writing general letters for the club
3. Helping other members including contacting ex-student members

In general its not the largest position in the club, but an important one-we are required by the union to fill this role, and its a good starting place if you want to be on the committee. It can also absorb other jobs especially from Captain.

Plus you get to be on the committee of the second oldest gliding club in the UK!

Publicity Officer

This job is not the most strenuous of the bunch, in fact, quite the reverse. To summarise, the main duty is the satisfying task of designing and printing posters, thus alerting as much of the IC community as possible to the wonders of gliding. Feel free to use your artistic license in poster design to pull in the freshers at the fresher’s fair.

(in aliteration terms, to summarise: Produce Posters to Pull in the Punters as Publicty officer.)

Other tasks include writing the occasional article for the union or felix, as alloted by the esteemed Captain, and maintaining the mailing list, or any other tasks. It is mainly a fun job, and does not take a lot of time, so stand for it, and have fun!

In the past the job of the website has been split over several people, but it is part of the publicity officers job description to look after it. As the main people who look after the gubbins of the website (Sage & Jamie) are leaving this year, it would also be good (and fairly neccessary) for any publicty officer to have a working knowledge of web design and php/MySQL or be prepared to get reading when changes need to be made. This isn’t a big job as the site has been revamped this year and has a nice web based back end for most changes, but if anything more needs changing basic web competance will be required (and no, being able to make sites in frontpage does not count as basic web competence.