SAFA Skysailor Magazine

8 SKY SAILOR September | October 2020 Victoria Turnpoint Challenge 2021 – Fly further Covid-19 compromised Victoria is forging ahead into the 2021 season with a new XC based tool to encourage paraglider and hang glider pilots to further develop XC skills and widen their horizons in their home fly-zones. We asked Dave (Snowy) Snowden, Bright based ardent competition and XC pilot and one of the instigators of the new TPC platform , about the concept of the Turnpoint Challenge. Great to see a new concept of flying come into the mix, can you explain what the TPC is all about? The basic concept is for pilots to fly their XC day and navigate themselves to specified turnpoints (TPs) and tag them. Collect as many as possible in a single flight or collect them throughout the season or at an event over a specified period of time. A sort of an arial Pokémon? Indeed, it’s not a completely new idea. The concept has been adopted by several clubs internationally, and we had tried a similar one in Australia a few years back. The Canungra crew in Queensland have a similar game of ‘pubtag’ (which also involves alcohol consumption!). We also use a similar concept when training for major comps or developing pilots’ XC skills. For the TPC, we’ve built on all these concepts and created a neat web-based platform to run it, tested it and found it to be of tremendous value and fun for all levels of pilot abilities. Participating pilots can chase down their own choice of TPs, try to better their personal bests by gaining more in a day, or chasing out to unique TPs through the season, run challenges against their peer group, club, region or in the overall results. What makes this different from XC distance scoring or task based comp flying?