WWGC.

On Monday, 20 January 2020 08:38:40 UTC-7, Nick Kennedy wrote:
This just blows my mind.
I've live in Australia and worked there.
Spent 4 full comps seasons Hang Gliding there.
This seems to me to be so out of character to the typical Aussies I know.
Cheating? NFW!
Its just not in their DNA if you ask me.
Does anyone really know what happened?
I'm not on FB
Did they use public tracking that was available to all with no time delay?
Or Did they hack the delayed tracking system?
How did they get caught?
Are team leaders in radio contact with their team all day?
What tipped other team leaders off that something was Up?

Best write up I have seen https://ussoaringteams.org/john-good...for-wwgc-2019/

On Monday, January 20, 2020 at 2:24:49 AM UTC-5, krasw wrote:
As a rule, competition pilots do not cheat, and do not like cheaters.

Yeah, well... some of our friends need a little more "help" following the rules than others.

I speculate, based on flight logs, that someone at WWGC hoped that they could skate on a pre-start airspace violation by pulling the brakes at 7500', landing, re-launching, then turning in a flight log containing only the second flight of the day. Is this cheating?

The claim of the Australian team (I am told) is that the tracking info they used was on a publicly accessible, unsecured web site and therefore available to all. Apparently, the claim wasn't completely persuasive...

Here's wishing the IGC good ideas informed by good insight. They have some difficult problems to grapple with.

T8

On Monday, January 20, 2020 at 9:51:32 AM UTC-7, Ron Gleason wrote:
On Monday, 20 January 2020 08:38:40 UTC-7, Nick Kennedy wrote:
This just blows my mind.
I've live in Australia and worked there.
Spent 4 full comps seasons Hang Gliding there.
This seems to me to be so out of character to the typical Aussies I know.
Cheating? NFW!
Its just not in their DNA if you ask me.
Does anyone really know what happened?
I'm not on FB
Did they use public tracking that was available to all with no time delay?
Or Did they hack the delayed tracking system?
How did they get caught?
Are team leaders in radio contact with their team all day?
What tipped other team leaders off that something was Up?

Best write up I have seen https://ussoaringteams.org/john-good...for-wwgc-2019/

John's analysis is very balanced and describes the situation very well. Those pilots (like myself) who have been around since the competition days of cameras and smoked barograph traces have been predicting this or similar dilemmas ever since we got GPS and other more advanced electronic capabilities. The question is whether to ban new developments completely or ensure that they are equally accessible to all competitors. An unenviable task for the rule makers and enforcers, as we have just witnessed.

Mike

On Monday, 20 January 2020 19:38:52 UTC+2, Tango Eight wrote:
I speculate, based on flight logs, that someone at WWGC hoped that they could skate on a pre-start airspace violation by pulling the brakes at 7500', landing, re-launching, then turning in a flight log containing only the second flight of the day. Is this cheating?


There is pretty clear rules for providing flight logs of all the flights of the day. Not doing that will pretty invalidate your day on the spot. If we speculate that this happened, it is worst cheating attempt I've heard of.

On Monday, January 20, 2020 at 11:51:32 AM UTC-5, Ron Gleason wrote:
On Monday, 20 January 2020 08:38:40 UTC-7, Nick Kennedy wrote:
This just blows my mind.
I've live in Australia and worked there.
Spent 4 full comps seasons Hang Gliding there.
This seems to me to be so out of character to the typical Aussies I know.
Cheating? NFW!
Its just not in their DNA if you ask me.
Does anyone really know what happened?
I'm not on FB
Did they use public tracking that was available to all with no time delay?
Or Did they hack the delayed tracking system?
How did they get caught?
Are team leaders in radio contact with their team all day?
What tipped other team leaders off that something was Up?

Best write up I have seen https://ussoaringteams.org/john-good...for-wwgc-2019/

Agree. There is a also a good write-up on Ritz's famous soaring blog ( http://soaring.eu/ ), from an e-mail to her (posted Jan 20):
"“The home team (Australia) had a (support) team member who had been involved, some years ago, in the creation of the tracking system used in the WWGC 2019. He was in possession of an url (address) that gave him access to the raw data (without the 15 minute delay) of all the participants in the competition. This information was used to coach the home team with respect to starting times, the location of thermals and their strength etc. It created a huge advantage for the pilots of the home team. It was not possible for other teams to find this url (address) so the disadvantage for them was real and could not be undone.
Was it illegal for the home team member to type in the specific url? No, probably not, but the data “found� was not owned by him. It was owned exclusively by the competition management. Seeing those data was one thing but using it to cash in on a competitive advantage for the home team pilots, was not only unethical but nothing less than plain embezzlement. A gliding version of insider trading as a matter of fact.

The team captain of the home team allowed the use of this “stolen� information on a daily basis, misleading to a certain extent his pilots with respect to the legality of the data used to coach them. They all knew it was “zero delay� tracking info but they conveniently (or ultra naively) overlooked the fact that it was in fact cheating on a monumental scale.
The 250 pt (later 225 pt) penalty issued to each home team pilot was basically a smooth over. You get 50 pts penalty for missing the barrel around a turn point by a few hundred meters, even when you round it on the outside of the barrel. That is a pretty stiff penalty…., but for unsporting behavior the price is a measly 25 pts a day. It apparently pays to cheat if the penalty is so light!!! According to the rules, as I interpret them, the whole home team should have been disqualified following this affair.
You wonder how the kingpin of this affair, the home team captain, who is also a leading executive in the Gliding Federation of Australia and a long time IGC delegate, can keep his position after this debacle..!
This occurrence has severely tarnished the image of gliding in general, the GFA in particular and has damaged the reputation of FAI. A very thorough investigation by FAI into this affair seems a necessity. �

Fairly emotional and strong language.

It will be interesting to see the Contest Manager's report, and the FAI/IGC response.

Thanks for sharing. This is a well written summary.

Within a few years from now, real-time internet will be available in almost every competition glider cockpit - perhaps that is already the case right now. This will enable sharing information on a scale that we cannot imagine yet. And no contest director will be able to track or even prevent this. In this light, I consider it a lucky (or unlucky, depends on how you look at this) coincidence that the incident happening in Lake Keepit became public at all.

My personal opinion on this: We better start thinking about how to incorporate this development in contest rules instead of sticking to the belief that we can prevent information from floating around freely.

Having said that, the unfortunate event in Australia was enabled by rules that will most likely be deprecated within the next decade.

I will be interested to see if the team captain is ever appointed as a WGC steward again. He is also the subject of an ongoing member protection case with regards to a previous world champs, and the paid executive officer of the National gliding body.

It is getting complicated.

Since is allowed to collect the data with an ogn reciever, it is clearly allowed to have the data. Therefore the australian team can't be penalised for having the data but only for the way that they got it.

This means that the person who got the data should be punished but not the pilots because as we found out, having the data is perfectly fine. But how do you punish the person that found it? Did he steal it or did something illegal? No, he just knew where it was.

Was he morally right to get it that way? Probably not but the rules are pretty ambiguous when they allow you to have the data and allow you to find it one way but apparently according to the jury not another ( legal) way.

Mart,

You are mistaken. The data was not from any Flarm based system. The data they were accessing was from the private Australian system of trackers that each competitor was required to carry.

On Monday, January 20, 2020 at 10:29:12 PM UTC, Charlie Quebec wrote:
I will be interested to see if the team captain is ever appointed as a WGC steward again. He is also the subject of an ongoing member protection case with regards to a previous world champs, and the paid executive officer of the National gliding body.

it's worse, he is actually in charge for the IGC to roster the Stewards for all IGC Class 1 Competitions!