All ye who proclaim that "I'm a sensible pilot, I would never do anything that dumb," should be clamoring for the hard deck to prevent those crazies from stealing a contest from you by thermaling low. They're out there, and they will.

The hard deck is good enough for navy top gun school. I guess they're not manly enough for you?


Readed my mind!


1 - Hard deck

On my first competitions we didn´t used yet minimum finish height here in Brazil, and I was feeling upset about the incentive to do stupid things on final glide... Regardles how fast I was on track there were allways the possibility of someone stealing your place only by irresponsible use of good luck.

Adding a hard deck on the whole contest area in my opinion would enhace security, it would force everyone to stop "pressing on" earlier in course (affecting decision making miles back the track), thus helping to avoid "no good landing options situations"

This deck heigh would depend on the terrain and weather we are flying in... it should not be too low in order to loose security sense, but not high enough in order to geopardyze the use of a otherwise "safely soarable day".

On F1 race, there are penalties for those who "put at least one wheel outside the track and get advantage with it". Our sport can adopt similar rules. As someone already said here, there are plenty of space between the racetrack and the guardrail/cushon/fence, why should we do not use the same "safety cushion"?

The hard deck may mean not landing out on track, some penalty points per occurence are enough incentive to avoid streching the risk.

I do not know about mountain flying, do not have experience on them.

2 - Flarm

Last pan american in 2017 in Argentina was an eye opening for me about the use of flarm (1st time using it). My past concern was that it would "beep" all the time without reason on a gaggle, but it did not happened... it only beeped when there was an actual incursion risk. In my humble opinion Flarm should be mandatory in all competitions, regardless of the number of gliders.

3 - Proximity penalty

But flarm alone is not the solution, a blue bird told me that IGC is already working on a score penalty proposal to discourage that fellow mate that "seems to be the owner" of the thermal. To me it would be a major improvement in safety.


Just my 3 cents.

Lautert - LA