Cliff, I'm sorry, but this 'Big Brother' thing is a great big Red
Herring. The OLC is intended to be a public forum. One of the main
purposes of the OLC is for pilots to be able to share their flight
experiences with the entire worldwide soaring community (and anyone
else who may be interested). The posted flight logs are downloadable so
people can view your flights by design, not by accident. So there
should be absolutely no expectation of privacy.

I suspect that there are a lot of competition pilots who have received
penalties in contests that they didn't think were fair. And I think we
may have inadvertently hit that raw nerve by confronting people with
flights they really should not have posted in the first place. But this
is not intended to be a punitive action to punish the individual, it is
intended to protect the integrity of the competition.

I also think we are getting side tracked on the regulatory issues,
which are not the main point. There is an interesting side thread on
insurance issues, which may shed a different light on this. But the
biggest issue is monkey-see monkey-do.

You should expect that other people will be studying your flight logs
to learn from your example. Some of these people may not realize that
they should not emulate your bad behavior because they are dumb like a
post. Others will do it to try to beat you because they are dumb like a
fox. Niether of these is a positive result.

You are correct that the rate of growth of the OLC has slowed, but I
think this has more to do with market saturation among the more
experienced pilots. To continue to grow the OLC, we will need to
attract less experienced pilots. Learning from other OLC participants
is probably the best selling point to this market segment. So we need
to make sure we don't have people learning bad habits.

Let me sum it up this way. If we don't discourage posting bad examples
to OLC, we will just see more bad examples, so that raises our 'Bad
Cholesterol'. At
some point, people will become disgusted, or discouraged by this, and
that will lower our 'Good Cholesterol'. So the net result is bad for
the health of the OLC. You may not like the cholesterol medicine, but
not taking it is worse.

Cliff Hilty wrote:
Doug, No real anger here! Just alittle disappointment
in what started out to be fun competition turning into
a lot of work and 'Big brother' watching me. It seems
that that was done in the interest of 'protecting'
our right to fly and as such the percieved notion that
the FAA/CIA/ homeland security or any other name you
might want to put here is going to punish the entire
group for the infractions of one. This leads to the
McCarthyism and self appointed enforcer mentality that
started this thread! It Just seems pointless, and has
diminished the growth of the OLC. Had it stayed the
same as last year I would suspect that it would have
grown at a much higher rate than it did.

Interesting though that you combined posts from Kirk
and I that are from two different forum's? Mine was
posted to gliderforum and Kirks here on RAS. Although
I totally agree with my old flying buddy, I only lay
claim to the last half of the post you quote.

At 03:36 14 September 2006, Doug Haluza wrote:
Cliff, not sure who your anger is directed at. Let
me just say that the
SSA-OLC Committee is trying to provide an outlet for
resolving
disputes, without making a public circus of it on r.a.s.
Unfortunately,
some people just cant accept this.

I think your MPD on this pretty well sums up the two
sides of the
debate. Most of the posters fall into two main groups:

A) Let pilots do what they want, and post any flight,
as long as they
live to tell about it.
B) Hold pilots to some kind of reasonable standards
to keep the
competition as fair as possible, and keep the feds
as far away as
possible.

There are variations of this, for example letting people
do A until
they get caught, then make them do B, or trying to
make the standards
in B some kind of absolute, or parse them down to the
sub-atomic
particle level. Another variation says that since we
can't do B 100%,
we should do 0% and default to A.

One of the things we have been doing is trying to continue
to grow the
OLC user base. And as the user base grows, the population
will
naturally have to include a wider range of opinions
and behavior. That
means we will also have to deal with more people holding
extreme views,
who won't accept the consensus norms.

The main thing to emphasize is personal responsibility.
You hit on that
when you talked about not posting flights that most
reasonable people
would find questionable. I think most people get that
intuitively. I
think almost everyone can grasp this with a little
peer pressure. But
then there are a few people....

Unfortunately, that's just life in the big city. But
we don't have to
let them spoil the fun.

Cliff Hilty wrote:
At 13:24 11 September 2006, Kirk.Stant wrote:
I find it absolutely fascinating that pilots that
will
cheerfully
exceed the posted speed limit (along with just about
everybody else, of
course) during the drive to the gliderport will then
pontificate about
minuscule infringements of vertical and lateral airspace
bounderies.

Uh, guys, these are regulations, not laws of physics!
You are safer at
18,300' looking out the window than at 17,700' staring
at the
altimeter!

Of course, I now fully expect to be viciously flamed,
but what the
hell, it's monday and it's raining....

Kirk
66

I have pondered over this in detail after having read
most of the threads in RAS and here. And I am still
undecided.

When OLC started it was purely fun and easy, now it
has become 'the' entity for showing not only the world
but even more importantly your local flying buddies
your acheivements. For years I flew in relative obscurity
with only a few people knowing what I did, where and
how fast I went. Now with posting to OLC everyone
with
any interest in soaring knows.

The question for me now becomes; Do I have a responsibility
to my flying buddies to protect their right to fly
and not bring unwanted attention of allegded violations
of the FAR's to our club and local flying area. To
that question I have to say yes.

On the other hand it makes me angry that a once fun
and purely innocent OLC (after all we are in it for
the money and chics) has been takin over by the aviation's
version of the 'Moral Majority' and turned into the
McCarthyism of everybody looking suspicously at each
others flights and airing those suspiscions publicly
in the name of protecting their right to fly. It just
smacks of Orwell's 1984 'big brother is watching'.
Read Soarpoint's post on RAS.

Then again we don't have to post our flights that
violate
the FAR's! So now you see why I am so undecided