SAFA Skysailor Magazine

11 September | October 2020 SKY SAILOR an expert pilot. It’s not necessary to fly a hot CCC wing when you have plenty of time to achieve the goals in this game. A prolific sport category pilot flying an En-B can easily outshine an expert on their latest hot ship who only gets out of bed on a glorious day. You’ve already had a season of running the TP Challenge in Victoria, how’d it go? Rather well! We had around 40 pilots registered last year with 27 collectively logging over 200 flights. Everyone got something out of it. Many started their first ventures into XC by way of the challenge, giving them personal achievement goals. Those who got more involved developed ‘niggle’ matches to chase their places on the tables. It wasn’t overly competitive in the ranks, but pilots discussed possibilities and considered XC options more than usual. Everyone had a sense of achievement from tagging TPs and thus flying to new places. For sure, we had ‘guns’ out there too, and one pilot tagged 40 TPs in one flight after many had thought 25 in a day was a lot! The most unique tagged by one pilot in the season was 100, which took that pilot to several different sites around Victoria to achieve. We had lots of very positive feedback and with the new platform we can now accommodate every XC pilot in Australia! Did you develop the new platform based on last season’s system? Yes, in 2019 we ran the challenge with Geoff Wong’s assistance on his Highcloud platform. This was great. Geoff put in a lot of work on the tech behind the scoring for which we are very grateful. We decided to move to a Bespoke platform, since we considered to develop this beyond state-wide, potentially nationally and multi-nationally, the workload was going to be too onerous for one person. So, we put together a team of seven system developers, all pas- sionate pilots who possess a range of skills from the fields of project management, I.T. coding and web skills blended with varied levels of flying experience, from two-year PG3 pilots, through to seasoned international comp pilots. Collectively, these folks have put in several hundred hours building and