bad weather conditions | Free Flyers Union

Task stopped too late

CIVL Delegate

By Julien Garcia on Tue, 21 Oct 2025 - 02:20

Discipline

Paragliding XC

What went wrong ?

More and more task are being stopped too late. Many reasons :
Submarine hardened the access to the radio and to the tracker. There is also a quite spread cultural belief amongst organizers which is : comp pilots should just give up when the conditions worsen. They are amongst the best, they should carry themself and act self responsible.
Another reason is linked to human factor. It can be hard to kill a task you created yourself. It's acknowledging you might have done something wrong or suboptimal.

What would you propose ?

- Mandatory check for radios on the ground (Registration / ToT + submask) and in the Air (answer obligation on MD / SD call).
- Task setter distinguished from task stopper : meet director / safety director.
- MD / SD Curriculum. "Pilots need to be protected from themselves". "They won't fly around".

Issue category

task stop

Safety

bad weather conditions

culture

Safety

Comments

By Jonas Prüssing on Tue, 21 Oct 2025 - 23:10

This is a real issue. I’ve noticed that the culture of level (LVL) reporting has gotten worse and worse over the past few years. One reason is probably the submarine-style harnesses, which make it more difficult than ever to report LVL while dealing with issues in the air.
Another problem is the new Flymaster trackers. They were supposed to make LVL reporting easier, but in reality, they’ve made the situation worse — because now, other pilots no longer receive LVL reports from fellow pilots. That means they don’t get warned and can’t relay this information further. The report now goes only to the ground organization.
We need to restore a culture of LVL reporting. One possible solution could be a mandatory PTT (push-to-talk) button for all pilots. This would make communication easy and allow reports even in difficult situations (e.g., during LVL 3). Additionally, it should be standard practice to explain the reporting system in the opening briefing, to encourage pilots to use it — or even to introduce penalties when unsafe conditions are not reported.

Organiser

By DusanO on Fri, 24 Oct 2025 - 12:04

That is / should be the main issue. How and WHEN the task are stopped or even they should never begin!!

I believe, that we/all pilots should have some self-reflect about this. We should always bear in mind, that task stopped too soon is WAY better and ALWAYS BETTER than task stopped too late!!
This should somehow need to change in pilots minds, and not be angry at MD, SD, pilots, that report L3, etc.. that task was stopped because of them and/or too early.
Therefore, there should be some (more) strict rules to follow.
1st. if the lunch site is not OK (back wind, too strong wind, etc.. then the task should be stopped/cancelled. And we should stick to the rule no matter what. Even if there are "perfect" conditions in the air.
2nd. If the conditions in the air got worsen, the task should be stop immediately. Not waiting till last moment or waiting for .. 10-20 L3 calls. (.. and as we saw, even this did not helped!!)
3rd ... etc..
The bottom line is, that there should be more strict end defined "preventive measures" which would make/force the "decision" automatically and not waiting for the "human error".

By Markos Siotos on Sat, 25 Oct 2025 - 01:45

The "defined" and "automatic" are the two key words in here...

The Task setter are usually the organizers themselves, or local pilots, so their friends, and have a vested interest into keeping people happy.

"People happy" means the venue is advertised for future events, and "people happy" means only one thing, flying tasks every day if possible.

So, there is an asymmetry in the "taskable days thing. We want it, they want it, nobody does not want it, so it has a huge bias of "happening" and the organizer feels that and makes it happen.

I agree that we need some simple numeric, uncontested benchmarks that would tell the organizer "forget about it" and keep the pilots at bay from attacking him / her for "canceling" or "stopping" a day.

The easiest of these would have been a limit on the "average forecasted wind during the task hours" but it can be many things.

We need to give them to the organizers, as tools to get the pressure of the competitors (that almost always want to fly) out of their shoulders...