Canada, Club Instances

The Cu Nim Proving Ground is where the scoring platform began. Inspired by the MayFly gliding contest held for decades at the Gatineau Gliding Club, Cu Nim looked to establish static tasks to create a common language of flying for novice pilots – tasks with names, vs a list of turnpoints.

Duly inspired by the time rankings used by the BBC program Top Gear, the club posted 3 task boards with magnetic strips to record and reorder top times per task as they were flown.

Through the 2018 flying season, this framework was turned into a Python bot that would test an .igc file against the defined tasks and return the time for a successful task flown, and with that a scalable platform with these shared benefits became available to all gliding clubs with similar challenges – how to develop soaring pilots from solo pilots.

Synthesizing feedback from SOSA, the bot was updated to include the ‘Racetrack’ task variant since even the smallest task originally required distance from the field that required a FAI Silver leg to have been flown, and the goals of the Proving Grounds are to build pilots into XC pilots, so it cannot be a prerequisite.

The Cu Nim Proving Grounds includes a racetrack bound by airspace limitations to the north and two triangles to the SE where many of the best thermal flights from the club launch toward, making pilots comfortable with the first leg into the open prairies.

Come to Black Diamond, Alberta and see if your best task time is fast enough to make the Task Board!

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Cu Nim Proving Grounds Task Sheet (March 2020)