IMPORTANT- Seeyou V's Strepla and airspace violations.

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