NEW Sporting Code rules

Well done FAI! You've now made it pretty much impossible to do a Silver distance from my airport with any acceptable degree of risk. The only airport that we can fly to that has terrain suitable for an outlanding near it is less than 50KM from our airport. Terminal airspace restrictions make it difficult to go farther than that particular airport. A start point (to which we would now have to tow to because that apparently is somehow more challenging than soaring to it) that is 50KM away has to be over mountainous terrain where the best case scenario for an outlanding is that you don't die. Given the altitude restrictions due to terminal airspace over the potential destination airport the release altitude would have to be at a height low enough to make the possibility of getting shot down into that unlandable terrain high enough that I couldn't in good conscience encourage it by acting as OO on such a flight. I've generally found it hard enough to get people interested in the FAI badges what with the paperwork hassle and the way they act like we're all a bunch of cheats and liars and now this. Brilliant! If they think landing at a different airport than the home field is so damned important why not just make that a requirement? As Tom pointed out the new rules don't necessarily require a landing away from the home field, just that instead of soaring to a remote start point you would now have to tow to it. I've already lost one (very experienced) friend who was well within 25KM of the home field and well within what should have been easy final glide in a modern 18M flapped ship to it who ran into sustained strong sink and was killed trying to land in the only tiny level fairly clear patch available after he had been hammered down 5,000 feet in a very short time. I've had enough flights myself where a wind shift turned an easy 15:1 final glide back to the field into a flight where if I hadn't managed to find lift and gain a few thousand feet I would have seriously considered jumping and coming down under the chute to put too much faith into the calculated final glide numbers.