A belated Happy New Year to all our visitors!

Now that the first year of Soaring Café is behind us, we would like to recap some highlights from 2011 and share some thoughts about where we’ve been and where we would like to go in 2012. We also want to thank you—our contributors, advertisers, and especially our readers—for supporting the Café during its seminal year and for your gracious compliments and constructive criticism.

The two of us (Bill and Rand) began talking about establishing an online presence in late 2010 and in October, we decided to go for it. We discussed the idea with our good friend Dick Butler and were delighted at his enthusiasm and buoyed by his encouragement. When Dick offered to write a serial history of his Concordia project to help inaugurate the Café, we were overjoyed. Dick and his collaborators (primarily Gerhard Waibel and Loek Boermanns) had been working on the Concordia since 2003 and aside from a few magazine articles and presentations, not much had been published and made available to the larger soaring community. Dick quickly assembled a complete history of the project that we published in installments from January through May. In recent months, we have continued to publish updates as the project progresses.

The response to SoaringCafe.com has exceeded all our early projections and expectations. Since we officially launched the site on January 1, 2010, we have published 564 posts. Our content has drawn over 600,000 page views, and we are currently averaging about 60,000 page views per month. At the beginning, most of our visitors were from the U.S.—no surprise since we are based in the U.S.—but by the end of 2011, our international visitors accounted for 57% of our audience. As I write, we have a presence in over 130 countries. The U.S. still leads with 43%, followed by Germany (12%), Canada (4.7%), the UK (3.8%), Australia (3.5%), and the Netherlands (3.0%). One of our goals in 2012 is to expand our presence in Europe, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and South America. So please help us spread the word among your soaring friends wherever they reside!

We are grateful to our advertisers whose confidence in us is measured by the hard-earned cash they have invested to help us succeed in our goal of becoming a premier online source of up-to-date news and information about the worldwide soaring scene. We urge you to continue to support our advertisers with your clicks and your money.

We are indebted to all our friends who have contributed articles, news, videos, photos, or advice; however, there are a few people and organizations who have made exceptional contributions that deserve special mention. If we were to select one individual who has made the most significant contributions to the Café, it would have to be Frank Paynter. Frank, also known as Tango Alpha on the U.S. contest circuit, has been more than prolific. His series of articles on using the Condor flight simulator as a tool for improving one’s cross country and racing skills have been very well-received. Even more popular, though, are his blogs published while competing in multiple U.S. contests during the 2011 soaring season. Thanks Frank, for sharing your unique viewpoint, opinions, and experiences with us and all our Café visitors last year. We hope you’ll continue to share your knowledge and experiences with us in the year ahead.

Another more recent addition to our phalanx of regular contributors is Ritz deLuy, who publishes excerpts from her www.soaring.eu blog on the Café every Sunday. Ritz has been a well-known figure in the international soaring community for decades and we at the Café are delighted to have her as a regular blogger.

Gordon Bettger and Hugh Bennett deserve special mention for sharing the excitement and beauty of their multiple record wave flights in the winter and spring of 2011. We expect to hear more from this dynamic duo in 2012.

Other exceptional Café contributors include Leo Benetti-Longhini for a variety of articles and continuing advice throughout 2011, and Jim and Simine Short for their coverage of the U.S. Vintage Sailplane Meet and the SOARING100 celebration in October.

We are pleased to acknowledge Paul Remde of Cumulus Soaring for helping get the word out about the Café, and to www.Streckenflug.at for linking back to several articles during the year and thereby expanding awareness of our Web presence.

We plan to cover the Soaring Society of America (SSA) Convention in Reno, Nevada next month. If you’re there, we would love to meet you. We’ll be easy to spot; just look for the two guys in Soaring Café shirts busily handing out business cards.

Best wishes to all of you for a safe and enjoyable soaring season in 2012!

Rand and Bill