Well, Tom, the answer, as always, is yes and no. Please see some comments
below.

"5Z" wrote in message
oups.com...

Doug and others are contacting the pilots directly and asking them to
remove the flight. It is the pilot's responsibility to remove the
flight - if I understand what has been going on recently. As I
understand it, there needs to be a gross disregard for sporting conduct
for the OLC organizers to remove a flight without a pilot's permission.

The idea here is to present a good image of our sport, not to nitpick
nuances of regulations.

Technically, I have to give it to Doug -- no flights that I know of have
been removed, per se. Instead, the score has been set to zero -- to my
knowledge, without as much as a notice to the pilot -- which has the effect
of moving the flight to the bottom of the very last page in daily results.
So if I am looking at the daily flights on the default OLC page, then the
flight simply won't be there. Do you call this "removed"? Well, yes and no.

(It is interesting to note that this action seems entirely
counter-productive in regards to the SSA-OLC's declared goal of presenting
good image to the FAA. If FAA were to trawl OLC for violations they'd pay no
attention to scores whatsoever.)

When I look at a flight on the OLC and the altitude exceeds 5500m
consistently, I'll take a closer look and may ping the pilot about it.
I don't (and probably Doug as well) download all logs and run them
through my "OLC Scruitinizer 2006"

I'll bet you a buck that this is precisely what Doug does -- download logs
and run them through "OLC Scrutinizer 2006". (Maybe not *all* logs... which
is a problem in and by itself that I already ranted about: how does he pick
the ones to scrutinize? Based on "formal complaints", we were told, but
let's face it -- this is not a transparent process.)

The reason I am so sure is this. Some violations that Doug alleges simply
can not be seen on the OLC flight information pages. Crude barogram in
meters is one example, but the latest wave of allegations (see the subject)
is a better one. Did you notice that takeoff and landing times do not show
anywhere on the OLC flight info page, nor do the local sunrise and sunset
times? Only the start and finish times do. So if a pilot finishes a task
before sunset, then that's what the OLC shows. If said pilot then makes a
straight line dash to the nearest suitable airport for a safe landing, and
meanwhile the Sun happens to cross the imaginary (as anybody who flies in
the mountains would know) line called horizon, then yes, we have a
violation. However, it won't show on the OLC -- instead, the trace will have
to be downloaded, run through the "OLC Scrutinizer 2006" and the actual
landing time extracted and compared to a reliable source of astronomic data.

So one thing I can tell: if anybody does actually benefit from this, this
fella Doug does a heluva lot of work for them.

-Tom
--
Yuliy