What future for the On Line Contest?

The Online Contest (OLC) registers pilots carrying out distance soaring flights. Participation is growing fast, with currently 12,000+ registered Gliding, Hang gliding and Paragliding pilots. Its organizer, Reiner Rose, and the FAI are studying the possibilities of a larger and more universal OLC. In the CIVL Bureau, Scott Torkelsen is in charge of this portofolio. Mr. Reiner Rose is well known as the organizer of the world’s largest online contest system, known as the OLC. His company, Segelflugszene gGmbH, is a non-profit closely held limited liability company that, among other services to glider pilots, declaredly pursues the goal of providing a free and simple-to-use worldwide online scoring and ranking service to registered pilots carrying out distance soaring flights. On March 13, 2005 Mr. Rose and Alvaro de Orleans-Borbon, an FAI executive officer, met at a country hotel near Nürnberg, and during a conversation lasting many hours many issues were explored and a broad understanding was reached. OLC WOULD LIKE TO:

• expand the current Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), currently with the International Gliding Commission, to include the CIVL and other applicable FAI air sport disciplines - rather than, as currently envisaged, to enter multiple separate MoU’s with each FAI commission. This may require a single, FAI-wide agreement;
• achieve a unification of all electronic file formats containing GPS flight logging information, possibily adopting the secure *.igc format, even if generated by different flight logging equipment in other FAI disciplines;
• be able, for OLC purposes and in view of the ultralight glider development, to consider gliding and hang gliding as one discipline, without a rigid demarcation;
• under a mutually agreeable framework, consider making available to FAI (or collaborate towards its technological development), certain know-how’s that may help to accelerate the growth and dissemination of worldwide competitive activities in FAI disciplines.

FAI MAY WISH TO:

• consider the suitability and adoption of an OLC-type Internet approach to promote global participation in competitive air sports and to facilitate the formation and growth of FAI air sport communities in countries currently not actively served by NAC’s;
• extend the utilisation of GPS based flight recording equipment and analysis to other FAI disciplines, such as (but not limited to) aerobatics and aeromodelling, for scoring, archiving and promotional purposes;
• offer novel or enhanced visualizations of the FAI air sports to television and to ground spectators by exploiting the graphic potential of the GPS files generated during FAI events;
• enhance the participation of air sport audiences, both passive (through new visualization strategies), as well as active (in form of real-time or delayed simulated competitions connected to actual FAI events).

Segelflugszene gGmbH may have know-how that could facilitate the development of the 4 points mentioned above, and may consider sharing it with FAI under the proper circumstances. TO PURSUE SUCH MUTUAL AIMS… … it was agreed that AOB would submit this report to the FAI President and officers in order to explore any further possible collaboration between Segelflugszene gGmbH and FAI.