CIVL has reinforced its Safety Team with Mitch Shipley, also a member of CIVL Bureau.

Mitch says: ‘I like the approach of listening to our competition pilots through methods like the CIVL Safety report form used at competitions, the review of CIVL incident reports and all discussions on CIVL Basecamp and perhaps best by being a steward at the competitions. In these ways we can learn about the issues and ideas on how to reduce the risk and improve the fun of our events. From such information, we can then implement changes to our sporting code and local regulation templates that achieve these goals. As a good example, pilots at the 2016 Cat 1 test event in Brasilia complained about how the 100% penalty for airspace altitude violations was implemented. As pilots approached and risked going over the “zero to 100%” penalty line, there were reports of high speed, uncontrolled flying to avoid going over the line. In response to that, the new local regulation template will include a default suggestion of the two-tiered, gradual linear penalty formula that will be used in Brasilia in 2017.’

Also in the Safety Team: Dennis Pagen, overlooking Basecamp, and Raymond Caux, updating our website.