US Rules Committee to ban XC Soar in US soaring competitioneffective immediately? - Ahh the "genius!"

I hate to bring this up again...but I must.

I have learned this morning that XCSoar is to be banned from US soaring competitions. In fact our rules committee is apparently planning to also ban all free, open source applications because they "feel" they cannot control whether these applications may implement artificial horizons and other "cheater" functionality. Clearly these elite rule makers don't seem to understand how easy it is to install and use a different apps (or simply build your own) for these cheater AH functions and have decided to inconvenience many pilots in US Soaring Competition in a last ditched effort to maintain their completely unenforceable AH rule.

Please confirm or deny, US Rules Committee, this news for the US Pilots who use or have just started to use this outstanding, free and intensely popular software...XC Soar? You might save alot of people $300 on their android PDA they are buying to run it...

While they get back to us...this news is apparently true (confirmed by XC Soar Developers) and the folks over at the US Rules Committee are working hard to write up the documentation required to ban XC Soar for US Pilots as we speak.

Gentleman of the US Rules Committee. I have officially lost all respect for your leadership assuming this is true. This is without question the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard of in any of the many sports that I have been involved in over my lifetime.

As you (Rules Committee) darn well know...many in the US have actually spent winter preparing XC Soar for this season and buying Dell Streaks to run XC Soar on.

Maybe we should start banning pee systems aimed aft because they give us extra thrust? While your at it maybe we should ban compasses because I can promise you that I can hold course in IMC with that instrument and an airspeed indicator alone? Maybe ban the Airspeed Indicator too? How about we ban all instrumentation altogether and just use the force? How about we ban pilots from watching star wars movies? They might learn something and become able to fly with their eyes closed?

I look forward to more comedy in the weeks to come per your upcoming announcement of this ban of XC soar and any other FREE Navigation Software.

Wow! You cant make this kind of stuff up...

Sincerely,

Sean Fidler
F2