HPAC/ACVL

Martin Henry · Posted: Wed Aug 15, 2018 10:43 pm Post subject: Parks Canada Trial Period, Data?

The News letter mentioned we have been granted with a continuance with the Parks Canada Trial.

Can BOD provide any information or Data from the Parks Canada Trial to date? Number of flights, number of pilots who taken advantage of the trial and???

Any sort of summary produced for Parks Canada that the members can see?

Thanks

Martin Henry

Tom Sliepen · Posted: Fri Aug 17, 2018 11:18 am Post subject:

Martin,

We have asked Parks Canada to provide such a report, but they are unable to do this at the moment. Last year they were swamped with the 150th anniversary and this year they haven't gotten around to it yet. Just like the extended time it took us to create the agreement to use the park (still in the trial stage) this summary report of the first years of the trial will likely take a while to appear.

Although it does not constitute an official assessment by any means, you could look up all the flights that have been recorded under the Jasper Tram site on Leonardo yourself.

Regards,
Tom

Martin Henry · Posted: Fri Aug 17, 2018 11:00 pm Post subject:

Tom, Parks Canada, a little backed up after one busy summer? You mean a giant well funded bureaucratic organization was unresponsive and unable to respond? Oh the "irony" Wink

In the category of "this can't be right"? I ran the filters on the PG Leonardo, I got 8 flights since 2015.

http://www.paraglidingforum.com/leonardo/tracks/world/alltimes/brand:all,cat:0,class:all,xctype:all,club:all,pilot:0_0,takeoff:56446

Before I set what little hair I have on fire and go on one of my rants about "what a waste of money", are the flights being uploaded to another server? Even skeptical me can't believe this is the total number of logged flights for this test program.

Martin

Nicolas Jones · Posted: Sat Aug 18, 2018 06:47 am Post subject:

The point of this exercise was not to get a lot of pilots to fly in one of the more remote parks.

The effort was first to get the federal regulations prohibiting free flight in national parks changed. Done, now each park administrator has authority to decide.

The next step was to set up a trial in any park anywhere - Jasper was the one that took the lead.

Not very many flights happened, but nothing bad happened and their beautiful park was not laid waste by paragliding activity. So now we have a positive reference and a foot in the door. It's disappointing that the report is slow coming, but we are not waiting for the report and are already considering for the next park to approach. The expectation is that as we add more parks and have more references the effort required will decline.

We could always use more volunteers to help move our various projects along.

Nick

Martin Henry · Posted: Sat Aug 18, 2018 10:30 pm Post subject:

Nick,

Based on 8 flights (which can't possibly be right), I doubt Parks Canada will believe we have a legitimate need... why bother with us. If flights were made and not logged as per the requirement we did a poor job living up to the agreement, which also reduces our credibility.

I know the executive director spent allot of time on project. I know the members spent $6000 plus on celebrating this project.

I agree it was a worthy effort but if we are going to commit members resources and revenue we should makes sure we follow through on proving its value. $6000 would have gone a very long ways toward site costs in Golden (like rebuilding the ramp?).

Martin