The start of this very interesting discussion was the fact that SSA has decided not to require Sporting Licences for National achievement awards.
The FAI Sporting Licence is relevant only to the SPORT of gliding - badges, records and competition. It has nothing to do with pilot's licences, parallel universes, or delegations from regulators. The Sporting Licence is intended to identify the holder and also the nation that the holder represents. This reduces confusion where a pilot has dual citizenship or is a long time permanent resident of a country but doesn't hold official citizenship. It is an FAI issued document, though the issuing authority is delegated to GFA in Australia. According to the FAI Sporting Code, a person can only hold a Sporting Licence from one national body at a time. The FAI Sporting Licence is not a certificate of competency. To the best of my knowledge, the $5 per year that we pay for a Sporting Licence goes entirely to the FAI Certificates Officer to cover costs of administration. I don't think the GFA or the FAI see a single cent. The only benefit I can see of retaining the requirement for a Sporting Licence locally in the area of badges and records comes where Australian National records are concerned. In this case, it would be reasonable to expect that the person claiming the National Record could show that they in fact represented Australia, and this can be done if the pilot holds a Sporting Licence issued in Australia. When seeking to provide insurance cover to competition officials, GFA and OAMPS also made use of the existing Sporting Licence structure to make this possible without imposing a separate accreditation process for competition pilots. This saved competition pilots the cost and administrative burden of any approach that required extra paperwork. Cheers Tim "Apparatchik to the gentry" PS: Reading some of the other contributions on this topic brought to mind the following quotation: "Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig" (Robert Heinlein) _______________________________________________ Aus-soaring mailing list [email protected] To check or change subscription details, visit: http://lists.internode.on.net/mailman/listinfo/aus-soaring
