darryl ramm's blog

I gave a talk on February 28th on FAI Badges at Williams Soaring as a part of the Valley Soaring Association winter seminar series. Here are the slides in PDF format.

I repeated this talk with slightly updated slides, at a Bay Area Soaring Associates (BASA) meeting on March 26th. Here are the PDF slides from the BASA talk

The talk does not set out to try to explain badges in whole, or be a cookbook for doing badge flights — instead I try to explain things that pilots seem to have trouble with such as observation zones, 1% rule, IGC flight recorders etc. This was prompted by the utter frustration I see people having either trying to understand the rules or having badge applications rejected.

Thanks to Judy Ruprecht the SSA badge and records administrator for some great advice and clarifications on things.

Here is a set of web handy web links

There are three “must read” FAI Badge documents -

• FAI Sporting Code Section 3 — Gliding
• FAI Sporting Code Annex C — Official Observer & Pilot Guide
• The IGC approval document for your particular flight recorder at the IGC GNSS Flight Recorder portal

Reading the approval document for your flight recorder is important as different flight recorders may have different requirements, for example whether they need to be sealed to the glider, whether the official observer needs to enter a security code etc.

Other resources are

• Soaring Society of America (SSA)  “Soaring Achievement” > “Badge Info” for forms, FAQ and other information
• IGC GNSS Flight Recorder portal for technical specifications, file formats, download and verification software and approval documents
• Just Soar  provides National Flight Database (NFD) derived airspace information for the United States. The default USA airspace data that come with SeeYou, Winpilot and other products are woefully out of date. The Just Soar data is what the SSA uses to check for airspace compliance on badge and record flights – it makes sense to use exactly the same data in your PDA, flight computer and in SeeYou for flight planning and post-flight analysis. Just Soar has also recently added TFR data.
• US Naval Observatory for Sunset times

Popular IGC approved flight recorder manufactures

• Cambridge Aero for Model 302, 302A and information on older Model 10, 20, 25
• EW Avionics for microRecorder and older Model D
• Garrecht Avionics for Volkslogger
• LX Navigation  for Colibri and LX series
• NK Soaring for ClearNav (IGC approval in process) and repair of older Cambridge flight recorder

Flight recorder calibration services popular with local soaring pilots

• Cambridge Aero for Model 302 and 302A
• Carl Herold, CH Engineering, Reno and Ely Nevada, cell phone (775) 230-0527 calibrates many types
• Craggy Aero calibrates many types
• NK Soaring for Cambridge Model 10,  20, 25 and the ClearNav once it is IGC approved

Popular soaring software

• Naviter for SeeYou, SeeYou Mobile and ConnectMe
• Glide Navigator II
• Winpilot
• XCSoar