On Tuesday, December 4, 2012 10:24:43 AM UTC-8, Ramy wrote:
Marc, I completely agree with everything you say (including starting final glide after sunset...). My grip is only on the requirement for the flight computer to be "certified". What's wrong with using SeeYou/XCSoar etc IGC files for badges and diplomas? I imagine much more pilots will be motivated to get their badges and diplomas if they could simply submit the IGC files from their flight computer, certified or not, just like OLC.


Ramy, the approval process is only intended to provide some sort of reasonable baseline for the quality, integrity, and reliability of the evidence used to document flights that result in various kinds of FAI awards. We can argue about where the baseline should be, but if you eliminate the baseline altogether, in my mind, it starts to affect the value of the awards. GPS receivers are not all equal in quality, not all recording capable consumer GPS units produce usable position evidence, and code running on on readily reprogrammable devices isn't necessarily what it looks to be. We need some standards, which is not to say that existing standards are cast in stone.

Perhaps the IGC will eventually decide that SeeYou, XCSoar, or whatever, provide acceptable evidence on some specific kinds of hardware, but that is not the same thing as saying they will provide acceptable evidence on any and all possible hardware on which they run, which implies that there would still be a need for some sort of approval/certification process...

Marc