Touring Motor Glider Association (TMGA) Announcements

Stradivari's Fly-In: Int'l Air Meeting for Historical & Sport Aviation, Cremona, Italy - 29th June thru 1st July - Aero Club of Cremona is proud to announce the Stradivari's Fly-In.The two days event program is composed by cultural activities such as a special Stradivari violin concert and guided tourist tours in Cremona historic area and museums. More information can be found at the following:

Harris Ranch, CA - Fun Fly - 12May2012 - We are planning a lunch fly-in for May 12, 2012 to enjoy the food and camaraderie. We are hopeful that this can be coordinated with the Carat group fly-in, which might stretch out over a few days. I attended their fly-in two years ago. More information can be found at the following:

Logo Selected - TMGA Member Toni Hausler developed a nice set of logos for us to use to help promote the TMGA. One is an emblem and the other is button.

2012 West Coast TMG Fly-In | July 12-15, 2012 | Minden, NV - TMGA is sponsoring our fourth annual Fly-In for Touring Motor Gliders. We are expecting up to 40 aircraft if our current growth trends are sustained. This is our major event and we hope you will use this website to help shape the event and prepare for attendance. More information can be found at the following:

Final Logo Selection Underway - TMGA Organizers have been batting around ideas for a logo. So we started a Forum thread and now we are nearing a final selection. If anyone has further advice or comments feel free to share them at link.

SSA Convention - TMGA is sponsoring a booth at the Annual Soaring Society of America (SSA) Convention in Reno, Nevada, Feb 2-4, 2012. Volunteers are needed to staff our booth. We also will be presenting a proposal to the SSA Board of Directors to become a recognized entity within the SSA. We have several commercial entities who have agreed to help sponsor our booth at the SSA convention. They are listed in our sponsorship section of the homepage to the bottom right. For more information about our SSA Convention plans please see our forum on this topic at: [ link ]

• Aeromot Ximango | XimangoUSA | Link
• Diamond HK36 Super Dimona | SkyKing Soaring | Link
• Phoenix S-LSA Motorglider | Phoenix Air USA | Link
• Pipistral Sinus, Taurus, Virus | Pipistral USA | Link
• Urban Aircraft Lambada | Contact Mike Tomazin | Link

Website: New Features

As new features come online that are related to design, architectures, infrastructure we will list them here so that users can be alerted to changes that might be of interest from the last time they visited:

• Newsletters: We added a listing of newsletters and ebulletins that are sent to members. See Members > Newsletters. [1Apr2012]
• Member Maps We added a capability to show Google Maps a) with a pin in it for every member; b) a pin with it for every member TMG, and c) a pin for motorglider CFIs who are TMG qualified. This map is only visible to registered and approved users of this website who are logged in (to protect privacy). It's available at Members > Rosters > Roster Maps. [13Mar2012]
• Help Expanded We expanded the video tutorials and they now include: Website Overview, Subscribing to Forums, Getting RSS Feeds, and Inserting Images into Forum posts. They are at Help > Tutorials. We also updated the New User Checklist, Help Homepage, and added Forum Help link under the Forums tab. Here you will find the default forum help (called Forum FAQ), a list of installed forum BB Codes (for advanced users), and a link to the forums online manual. [11Mar2012]
• New Server - We shutdown the website for about a day to move it to a new server. Now we have a semi-dedicated server with complete server-level control for our website. This should improve our performance and flexibility. For example, one key reason this was important was to allow us to install some tools in the root directories to enhance the search and export capabilities of the Knowledgebase. [7Mar2012]
• Re-Organized the Homepage - We installed a countdown timer for the fly-in, and reorganized the accordion panels on the homepage a bit. [15Feb2012]
• External Newsfeeds - We cleaned up the newsfeeds, added more, and split into "Motor Glider & Soaring" and "Aviation" loaded as individual "Sublinks" under the "External Newsfeeds Link" [15Feb2012]
• Webstite Tutorials - We are developing a collection of tutorials to help users/members better exploit the capabilities of our website. Video tutorials can be found by navigating to Help > Tutorials (where this notation instructs the user to first select the Help "tab" in the Navigation Tab Bar and then the Tutorials "link" visible in the sub-Navigation Bar area after selecting Help. We are also keeping a comprehensive list of such instructional materials in the Knowledgebase at: [ link ] [12Feb2012]
• Fly-In Sign-Up Sheet - Installed a preliminary fly-in sign-up sheet at: [ link ] [3Feb2012]

Website Content Highlights & New Content

As key content or special features are added to website we will try to summarize below:

Mira Slovak - Mira Slovak is a well-known pilot who has been involved with aviation for many years and is famous for, among other things, flying a touring motor glider across the Atlantic Ocean. We have compiled some interesting materials at the following locations: [6Feb2012]

• Articles in the Knowledgebase: [link1 link2]
• Files in the Knowledgebase: [file]
• Photo Galleries: [link]