IMPORTANT- Seeyou V's Strepla and airspace violations.

Mike,

Quite true - you can certainly be underinsured! One way to remedy that
is to buy higher limits, or you can also get an umbrella liability
policy that would cover your home, your car and your plane.

But to me the interesting issue is whether you have insurance coverage
if you violate the FARs. I'm sure that I would be covered, given how my
policy reads, but it's possible that others may have different
language.

Does anyone have an aviation insurance policy that specifically states
that they won't be covered if they are in violation of the FARs?

-John

Mike Schumann wrote:
The other thing to remember is that your insurance coverage has $ limits.
If you engage in activity that makes you liable, and the damage exceeds your
insurance liability limits, you will still be personally on the hook for the
balance. It's not hard to imagine this being a real issue if you are at
18,500 ft without a clearance and get hit by a business jet.

If you get hit by a business jet, you could easily see property damages in
the $10-20 Million range plus damages for personal injury or death claims.

I don't think there are very many pilots who have liability coverage that
comes anywhere close to this.

Mike Schumann

"jcarlyle" wrote in message
oups.com...
Mike,

Quite true - you can certainly be underinsured! One way to remedy that
is to buy higher limits, or you can also get an umbrella liability
policy that would cover your home, your car and your plane.

But to me the interesting issue is whether you have insurance coverage
if you violate the FARs. I'm sure that I would be covered, given how my
policy reads, but it's possible that others may have different
language.

Does anyone have an aviation insurance policy that specifically states
that they won't be covered if they are in violation of the FARs?

-John

Mike Schumann wrote:
The other thing to remember is that your insurance coverage has $ limits.
If you engage in activity that makes you liable, and the damage exceeds
your
insurance liability limits, you will still be personally on the hook for
the
balance. It's not hard to imagine this being a real issue if you are at
18,500 ft without a clearance and get hit by a business jet.

Doug Haluza wrote:
Ramy wrote:
Encourage pilots to install a transponder and turn it on.

Agreed, transponder use is a good thing. This is why we need to
actively discourage posting 18K flights on OLC (without an
explanation). People use the OLC to see what more experienced pilots
do. If they see this, they will emulate it. And if they do they will
have to turn their transponders off, otherwise ATC will see them going
over 18K. So clearly this would compromise safety in multiple ways.


I sure hope that pilots don't turn off their transponders if they
accidentally go over 18K, this would be a serious and intention
violation. At least with a transponder on, while violating the FARs,
they pose less collision risk then below 18K without a transponder.

Now if you can follow that argument, the sunset argument is not that
different. If people see flights continuing well past sunset, they will
think that's OK, and they will do it too. If they are trying to be
competitive, they will stretch the limits even further. So clearly we
need to discourage this as well.


Agreed, but you would have achieved much better results and response if
instead of enforcing it retroactively you would clearly publish the
rules (instead of hidden behind the "about" link) and enforce it going
forward (preferably automatically). The olc currently has a repository
of 4 years worth of thousands of flights, including quiet a few winning
flights, which ended after sunset. Should we remove them all?

Ramy

Cliff, I'm sorry, but this 'Big Brother' thing is a great big Red
Herring. The OLC is intended to be a public forum. One of the main
purposes of the OLC is for pilots to be able to share their flight
experiences with the entire worldwide soaring community (and anyone
else who may be interested). The posted flight logs are downloadable so
people can view your flights by design, not by accident. So there
should be absolutely no expectation of privacy.

I suspect that there are a lot of competition pilots who have received
penalties in contests that they didn't think were fair. And I think we
may have inadvertently hit that raw nerve by confronting people with
flights they really should not have posted in the first place. But this
is not intended to be a punitive action to punish the individual, it is
intended to protect the integrity of the competition.

I also think we are getting side tracked on the regulatory issues,
which are not the main point. There is an interesting side thread on
insurance issues, which may shed a different light on this. But the
biggest issue is monkey-see monkey-do.

You should expect that other people will be studying your flight logs
to learn from your example. Some of these people may not realize that
they should not emulate your bad behavior because they are dumb like a
post. Others will do it to try to beat you because they are dumb like a
fox. Niether of these is a positive result.

You are correct that the rate of growth of the OLC has slowed, but I
think this has more to do with market saturation among the more
experienced pilots. To continue to grow the OLC, we will need to
attract less experienced pilots. Learning from other OLC participants
is probably the best selling point to this market segment. So we need
to make sure we don't have people learning bad habits.

Let me sum it up this way. If we don't discourage posting bad examples
to OLC, we will just see more bad examples, so that raises our 'Bad
Cholesterol'. At
some point, people will become disgusted, or discouraged by this, and
that will lower our 'Good Cholesterol'. So the net result is bad for
the health of the OLC. You may not like the cholesterol medicine, but
not taking it is worse.

Cliff Hilty wrote:
Doug, No real anger here! Just alittle disappointment
in what started out to be fun competition turning into
a lot of work and 'Big brother' watching me. It seems
that that was done in the interest of 'protecting'
our right to fly and as such the percieved notion that
the FAA/CIA/ homeland security or any other name you
might want to put here is going to punish the entire
group for the infractions of one. This leads to the
McCarthyism and self appointed enforcer mentality that
started this thread! It Just seems pointless, and has
diminished the growth of the OLC. Had it stayed the
same as last year I would suspect that it would have
grown at a much higher rate than it did.

Interesting though that you combined posts from Kirk
and I that are from two different forum's? Mine was
posted to gliderforum and Kirks here on RAS. Although
I totally agree with my old flying buddy, I only lay
claim to the last half of the post you quote.

At 03:36 14 September 2006, Doug Haluza wrote:
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

I think this is the nub of it. As an aspiring soaring pilot, I try to
learn from my betters, but not repeat their mistakes nor fly outside my
competance zone.

If I download and look at an Andean wave flight, I do not immediately
think - Oh, I can also go and fly at 30,000 feet in rotor and next to
large mountains, because I would probably kill myself due to lack of
oxygen, structural damage and CFIT. That does not mean that the flight
should not have been posted.

Similarly if I review an open class competitor flight with a marginal
final glide low over difficult terrain and some low scrapes, I would be
foolish to attempt to emulate it.

Nor if I see a flight with a mistake eg clipping airspace, landing late,
starting engine too low etc etc do I think - Oh I should try and emulate
these mistakes. No, I think that I should try to avoid a similar mistake
myself or that I have a different level of risk assessment.

If I thought of flying in the US (unlikely due to disagreements about
global politics) then I would study US flights, but not so that I could
repeat mistakes.

I suspect that the vast majority of pilots try to learn from the
mistakes of others, rather than try to emulate them.

But then I regard the OLC as an opportunity to learn and share
experiences rather than a full-blooded competition.

I have no problems with the authorities analysing OLC flights which
might result in a competition win/place or badge claim or record claim
or ranking for entry into a restricted places competition eg nationals,
to a detailed scrutiny, but my views are that the remainder should be
left so that pilots can learn from others' experiences.

Why don't you limit detailed scrutiny to flights which might impact on
your local US competition places ie probably the top 5-10 pilots?
So what if some infringements alter the different positions between
persons ranking 50th and 60th.

Rory, UK


Author: Doug Haluza
Date/Time: 03:00 15 September 2006
------------------------------------------------------------
"The OLC is intended to be a public forum. One of the main purposes of
the OLC is for pilots to be able to share their flight experiences with
the entire worldwide soaring community (and anyone else who may be
interested). The posted flight logs are downloadable so people can view
your flights by design, not by accident. So there should be absolutely
no expectation of privacy."

"But the biggest issue is monkey-see monkey-do."

"You should expect that other people will be studying your flight logs
to learn from your example. Some of these people may not realize that
they should not emulate your bad behavior because they are dumb like a
post. Others will do it to try to beat you because they are dumb like a
fox. Niether of these is a positive result."

jcarlyle wrote:
Erik,

Insurance policies are "exclusionary contracts". This legal term means
that if something doesn't appear in writing as an "exclusion", then the
insuree has coverage. This came about because the law recognizes that
the insuree has no ability to change the contract, but rather must buy
it as it comes from the insurance company. To level the playing field,
the law will find in favor of the insuree unless the policy
specifically says in writing that something will not be covered.

I have an SSA policy on my glider issued through National Fire
Insurance of Pittsburgh, whose address is in New York City(!). Nowhere
in the policy does it state that I must operate the aircraft in
accordance with the FARs. I do not have any intention whatsoever of
violating the FARs, but if I did so inadvertently and something
happened, I would still have insurance coverage. I'd also have trouble
with the FAA, but that's another matter!

Interestingly, my policy doesn't say anything about an annual being
required, unless that could be tortured out of the following phrase:
"If (I) know that the aircraft is not certificated by the FAA under a
Standard Airworthiness Certificate in full force and effect while in
flight". It does, as you say, require that I have (a) "a current and
valid FAA Pilots Certificate with ratings and endorsements applicable
to (my) aircraft", (b) "if required, a current and valid Biennial
Flight Review", and (c) "a written endorsement from a Certified Flight
Instructor to solo the same make and model as (my) aircraft.

Bottom line: read your policy very carefully, word by word. If
something isn't specifically excluded, then you do have coverage.

-John

Papa3 wrote:

John,

Absolutely correct. I was operating from memory without the benefit
of having my SSA Group Policy in front of me. I had a policy in the
past which specifically had verbiage to the effect that the aircraft
must be "operated in compliance with all applicable federal regulations
under CFR parts..." I'll see if I can dig that one up.

A few comments related to your post.

- As you note, the SSA Group Policy does in fact specify pilot and
aircraft airworthiness qualifications. There is an endorsement which
modifies the section you cited to include Experimental Airworthiness.
- In practice, the insurer can and will use any limitations to their
benefit if there is a major claim. Everyone needs to remember that
the insurer's goal is to avoid paying claims. So, even if
airworthiness (for example) is not the cause of an accident, that can
be used to void coverage (see the case history in Yodice's article).
I have several more examples of this available.
- As far as all of the different company names and addresses on your
policy, that has to do with the fact that insurance is regulated by the
states. Insurers typically acquire or establish entities in a given
state in order to meet licensing requirements. In our case (SSA Group
Policy) it all rolls back to AIG.

I guess my bigger mission was to point out that there is a significant
personal, financial risk involved in operating at the boundaries of
what is legal. Since the altruistic approach of looking out for our
fellow sportsmen doesn't always work, I hoped that the idea of looking
out for one's selfish interests might be additional incentive to play
by the rules.

Regards,

Erik

Erik,

I'm really intrigued that at one time there was specific language
that nullified aviation insurance coverage if you weren't operating
in compliance with the FARs. If you could find the exact phrase they
used, I'd love to see it.

Agreed - insurance companies will do everything they can to avoid a
payout, and it's smart to keep that in mind. Probably it would also
be wise to note that most (all?) US states have an insurance department
or agency. There's a very good reason for this - 100 years ago
there wasn't much difference between an insurance company and a
privateer.

The reason I gave my insurance company name and address was to make an
ironic point, and it clearly failed. You see, the company was formed in
Pittsburgh, PA, while the address is in New York. Furthermore, I live
in Pennsylvania. Oh, well...

I understand your mission to persuade/coerce people to play by the
rules. My own incentive to stay legal is simple - if it weren't for
bad luck I wouldn't have any luck at all. Thus any rule I try to bend
will bite me in the butt. Instant rule enforcement!

-John

Papa3 wrote:

John,

Absolutely correct. I was operating from memory without the benefit
of having my SSA Group Policy in front of me. I had a policy in the
past which specifically had verbiage to the effect that the aircraft
must be "operated in compliance with all applicable federal regulations
under CFR parts..." I'll see if I can dig that one up.

A few comments related to your post.

- As you note, the SSA Group Policy does in fact specify pilot and
aircraft airworthiness qualifications. There is an endorsement which
modifies the section you cited to include Experimental Airworthiness.
- In practice, the insurer can and will use any limitations to their
benefit if there is a major claim. Everyone needs to remember that
the insurer's goal is to avoid paying claims. So, even if
airworthiness (for example) is not the cause of an accident, that can
be used to void coverage (see the case history in Yodice's article).
I have several more examples of this available.
- As far as all of the different company names and addresses on your
policy, that has to do with the fact that insurance is regulated by the
states. Insurers typically acquire or establish entities in a given
state in order to meet licensing requirements. In our case (SSA Group
Policy) it all rolls back to AIG.

I guess my bigger mission was to point out that there is a significant
personal, financial risk involved in operating at the boundaries of
what is legal. Since the altruistic approach of looking out for our
fellow sportsmen doesn't always work, I hoped that the idea of looking
out for one's selfish interests might be additional incentive to play
by the rules.

I'd like to point out one self-contradiction and one outright outrageous
assumption in this post.

"Doug Haluza" wrote in message
oups.com...
The OLC is intended to be a public forum. One of the main
purposes of the OLC is for pilots to be able to share their flight
experiences with the entire worldwide soaring community (and anyone
else who may be interested).

This contradicts the following:

I suspect that there are a lot of competition pilots who have received
penalties in contests that they didn't think were fair.
[confronting people] is not intended to be a punitive action to punish the
individual, it is
intended to protect the integrity of the competition.

So is OLC a public forum, or a competition? If former, you will do the
public a huge favour if you quit "protecting" forum's integrity. If latter,
then yes, it should be controlled more strictly, but then don't call it
"public" anymore -- only a fraction of pilots are interested in real
contests.

The control that SSA began to exercise over the OLC-US (called SSA-OLC
now -- note how OLC used to come first) pushes it towards the contest side
of it. Why? Or, more relevantly, what for? If you wish to run it this way,
don't be surprised if it becomes as popular as other SSA-sanctioned contests
in this country.

Some of these people may not realize that
they should not emulate your bad behavior because they are dumb like a
post. Others will do it to try to beat you because they are dumb like a
fox.

Aside from these two groups, do you think there are any intelligent people
left around? Because for a second you sounded as if, one way or the other,
everybody is dumb around you -- like a post or like a fox. Maybe you are
spending too much effort protecting us from us.
--
Yuliy

P.S.: "This is by far the hardest lesson about freedom. It goes against
instinct, and morality, to just sit back and watch people make mistakes. We
want to help them, which means control them and their decisions, but in
doing so we actually hurt them (and ourselves)." -- [apparently by Ernest
Christley]

jcarlyle wrote:
Erik,

I'm really intrigued that at one time there was specific language
that nullified aviation insurance coverage if you weren't operating
in compliance with the FARs. If you could find the exact phrase they
used, I'd love to see it.

Agreed - insurance companies will do everything they can to avoid a
payout, and it's smart to keep that in mind. Probably it would also
be wise to note that most (all?) US states have an insurance department
or agency. There's a very good reason for this - 100 years ago
there wasn't much difference between an insurance company and a
privateer.

The reason I gave my insurance company name and address was to make an
ironic point, and it clearly failed. You see, the company was formed in
Pittsburgh, PA, while the address is in New York. Furthermore, I live
in Pennsylvania. Oh, well...

I understand your mission to persuade/coerce people to play by the
rules. My own incentive to stay legal is simple - if it weren't for
bad luck I wouldn't have any luck at all. Thus any rule I try to bend
will bite me in the butt. Instant rule enforcement!

-John

Papa3 wrote:


Sorry I was slow on the irony uptake. Friday and all that...

I filed away old hardcopy insurance policies when we moved and assume
they are buried somewhere beneath a godawful ugly cut glass picture
frame we got as a wedding present and some outgrown kids clothes. But
I digress.

I'm sure I recall the exclusion I mentioned. Googling around leads
to various aviation insurance brokers and court cases, and several
mention failure to operate in compliance with FARs as a potential
Exclusion. All of them very clearly point out the issues related to
pilot qualification and airworthiness. Articles include:

http://www.globalair.com/discussions...cle~/msgID=133

http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/ca9/newopinions.nsf/A49420EE0F8959C588256FC500824CBC/$file/0316671o.pdf

Interestingly, AVEMCO hilights the fact that they have "done away with
blanket FAR exclusions", implying at least that these used to exist.


Regardless, as others pointed out, $1M limit of liability that most
people carry won't scratch the surface if they were involved in a
serious accident where they were clearly at fault. Just another reason
not to tempt fate...

P3

Yuliy Gerchikov schrieb:


The control that SSA began to exercise over the OLC-US (called SSA-OLC
now -- note how OLC used to come first) pushes it towards the contest side
of it. Why? Or, more relevantly, what for? If you wish to run it this way,
don't be surprised if it becomes as popular as other SSA-sanctioned contests
in this country.

The OLC puts the name of other organizations infront of the name if they
help to organize the competition, and puts just the abbreviated name of
the country after the TLC OLC, when the OLC for said country is managed
by the OLC team only.