CIVA President's page: Meeting with a living legend

The winter is still keeping Northern Europe in a firm grip with snow and double digit minus degrees during the night and a few plus during the day, the spring is delayed but around the corner and with the spring we finally have the start of the aerobatic flying.

On Easter Monday I flew to Prague to meet Vladimir Machula, CIVA’s IT Expert to discuss our IT-projects together with Philippe Küchler our E-learning expert that will move CIVA into the modern age of IT-technology. Vladimir is now finalising the E-learning system for Judges and Assistants and Philippe Küchler is this year arranging the questions for the judges to test their knowledge about our Rules in Part 1 & 2 with all new rules. Other IT-projects is the new internal web page civa-news.com that is up and running, but needs to be filled with more info and the new system to handle costs for CIVA officials. Of course our official web paged will remain www.fai.org/aerobatics.

Philippe Küchler, Jiří Kobrle, LG Arvidsson and Vladimir Machula at Letnany airport in Prague

Earlier this year I had forwarded some questions to Jiří Kobrle about Championships in the 60-ties and Vladimir arranged a meeting with him. Jiří Kobrle who is turning 78 years was flying in WAC 1964 in Bilbao, Spain with a Zlin 226 AS. The stories he can tell is a fantastic part of our aerobatic history. It’s very interesting to hear him talk about aircraft and pilots with names like Ladislav Bezák, Niel Williams, József Tóth, Erwin Bläske, Charlie Hillard and many many more. How competitions was organised half a century ago and before the Aresti Aerocriptographic System was adopted by FAI. How judges was selected and scores were calculated a time long before the first Tarasov-Bauer statistical method was adopted. As usual Jiří always have surprises and this time he asked if we wanted to fly over Prague and the old city witch is a totally restricted area, but with his connections everything is possible. With the classical twin engine L200 Morava from the 60-ties Jiří took us on an interesting flight. During the years Jiří has been awarded very many diplomas, medals and awards and was in 2008 awarded the FAI Gold Air Medal for his lifelong dedication to aviation and especially aerobatics. Together with Jiří we could have kept on talking for many more hours but he had an appointment as simulator instructor and had to leave. We had a wonderful afternoon with Jiří and I’m sure he will keep on for years.

LG Arvidsson
CIVA President