First let me say "I have never flown in a contest, but my friends have."

A few years ago one of these friend took his well maintained Schreder
sailplane to the Sport Class National contest. He is a skilled pilot and
placed in the middle of the pack. At the time his EW Model D and Garmin
were acceptable. For him to compete in the future he will be required to
invest between 10 and 20 percent the value of his glider and trailer.

What information is provided by the "approved" flight recorders that cannot
be derived from a EW Model D?

It appears that this type of rule's only purpose is to keep people with big
buck gliders from being embarrassed by a kid flying an affordable 40 year
old bird.

Wayne
HP-14 "6F"
http://www.soaridaho.com/Schreder




wrote in message
...
On Jan 23, 3:11 pm, wrote:
....Snip...

Prior to 2008, if a flight recorder met the functional requirements in
the Rules, it could be used as a backup. Period. We can argue about
what was intended but that's what the rules said and that's what I and
some others did using a cheap off-the-shelf Garmin unit. Last year the
RC changed the rules: the functional specs were kept but you created
three lists/classes of flight recorders and it was problematic whether
COTS were accepted as backups (I was graciously granted a waiver to
fly the October Region 4 contest with mine pending the RC's meeting).
This year the process is complete: there are two categories of flight
recorders, and COTS are tossed into the ingeniously titled
"substandard" category [I love that name: did you guys debate using
"schlock" or "junk" or "second class" as the descriptor or was this
your unanimous choice? g]. And the way I read the chart, COTS are
only for regional, not national use, and only by waiver (i.e., there's
no X in the Nationals column for COTS in Appendix B).

.... Snip ...

Chip Bearden
ASW 24 "JB"
USA