Oz Report

July 15, 2018, 7:33:44 MDT

Following the rules

The primary tracker

CIVL|CIVL Sporting code|Gerolf Heinrichs|Ivan Lukanov

Gerolf responds (and finds an issue with the CIVL Sporting code):

Thanks for your reply, Ivan Lukanov!

You are spot on the money when bringing up the issue with using a backup. I have no doubt that you organizers would be unbiased towards all pilots and nationalities. I also didn't imply that Tom was in any way cheating when cutting the corner, or that there was any intent. I just pointed out that he DID NOT TAKE the turnpoint correctly according to the tracklog.

I am of course aware that every pilot navigates with his personal instrument (Tom flies a Naviter Oudie 4 from what I recall), most of all because the Flymaster trackers that you provide to all pilots as primary instruments for flight verification have no displays to navigate with. I also don't want to go into doubting whether or not Tom's flying instrument mislead him.

What surprises me here is that you were willing to accept Tom's flying instrument as a backup given the fact that his primary instrument, his Flymaster tracker, DID NOT FAIL. It just shows him in very smooth tracking fashion to NOT MAKE the turnpoint. That is very different from running out of batteries, or encountering a dodgy signal or such.

Why is this important? Most of all because there is this rule 4.2.1 in SECTION 7a, 4 GPS flight verification, 4.2 GPS USE, covering precisely this case. I quote (but please have a look together with the CIVL officials to see for yourself).

4.2.1 Back-up logger

A pilot may use multiple GPSs for verification and backup. Each pilot must designate the primary logger that will be downloaded as the primary source of scoring and the secondary one(s) to be used as backup, only in case of a malfunction of the primary logger.

Since it is so explicitly stated in this Sec7 rule there is very little wiggle room here, isn't there? If the primary logger prooves - and that is precisely what it does - that the pilot is not inside the TP sector he simply is not in. That is why I brought it up in the first place. The backup can NEVER overrule the primary, it can only help out if the primary fails. It's a tough rule, I know, but think of the implications it would create for organizers not having said rule.

So the question is, do the pilots explicitly designate the Flymaster trackers as their primary logger or is this just a convenience for the meet organizers to provide them so as to make live tracking work and to make scoring easier? Do pilots in fact ever designate their primary loggers?

Also 4.1 states:

Flights will be verified using either GPS track log or live tracking data. When live-tracking data is used as a primary source of scoring, pilots must be able to produce GPS track logs as a back-up.

What is interesting to me, other than the mixed messages of the CIVL Sporting Code, is why would these two instruments have different track logs.