Posts to the SSA contest page are permanent parts of contest
reporting. The Logan contest management expected that material posted
to the official webpage would be factual. While blogs may embellish
or exaggerate to make the material more interesting, it is important
to provide true statements on the official website that do not mislead
readers. Unfortunately the posts to the website had misleading
statements that were beyond mild exaggeration. The statement that led
to the removal of the posts was from the Day Three report (July 22,
2011):

“As it turned out, a huge cloud street set up well to our north over
Sherman Peak running horizon to horizon east-northeast to west-
southwest that ran right through the 15m task area. ”All” we had to
do was get to Sherman Peak, connect with the street, run it for 80
miles out over completely unlandable (and uninhabited) terrain, turn
around and get home, and all but one 15m pilot was able to do this in
some fashion or another.”

While the statement makes for sensational reading and from the
comments on RAS many believed it; unfortunately it was misleading and
was well beyond exaggeration for effect. After reviewing Frank’s
flight for that day (July 21st), it is evident that he was never more
than eight miles from landable fields and this was at flight altitudes
of 4500 to 9000 feet agl. You can download his KML file from the OLC
and review it in Google Earth. Please notice both the many
communities, farms, airports and landable fields he and the rest of
the competitors flew over. You can review my July 3rd flight where I
landed in the flight zone of the July 21st contest flight to see that
many of the fields that are not green are also landable. Almost every
valley in the flight area is filled with landable fields. In general,
most of the tasking area in Logan has many airports and landable
fields in all quadrants. It is one of the safest mountain sites that
I have ever flown at and I have received similar comments from top
pilots that have flown at Logan. It is somewhat intimidating to the
new pilots that are not familiar with mountain flying, but those that
embrace it come away excited about the possibilities and find they
approach their flying in a different way after the experience. I
encourage the readers here to do their due diligence and review flight
logs and tasks in Google Earth before believing everything they read
in blogs and RAS.

The Logan contest management felt that while it was perfectly fine for
Frank or any other blogger to write their opinions, they should not be
posted as part of the official website. There were also many other
bloggers at the contest and this leads to the question of how best to
provide easy access to all bloggers without officially endorsing
them. The best solution was to remove the posts and provide links to
Frank’s and others’ blogs as part of the official daily report.
Readers can easily link to the blogs and it provides a clear
separation from the official report.


Tim Taylor