http://www.xccomp.org/


Andreas Rieck and Rudl Buerger, those were the guys at the DHV that you wrote to
if you had a problem with your flight on the HOLC. Well the DHV has pulled out
of its agreement with the OLC guys to help run the HOLC, and now they have their
own competition, the XC Competition (DHV Gliding Contest). Here's what they sent
to all the pilots that they knew were previously in the HOLC:

DHV starts on 01.March 2007 with the national xc-championship as the primary
address: www.xc.dhv.de


DHV is looking forward to cooperate with other XC systems. The finally goal will
be an international flight data management among all interested systems.


One of these will be XCComp: XCComp is running as well since 01.March 2007 under
www.xccomp.org


Feel free to register as Pilot and claim your flights. All flights since end of
season 2006 can be claimed till 31.03.2007. All known scorings of OLC 2006 will
be implemented step by step. In future the XCC will be part of an international
flight data management.


Some nations already support this system.


Under FAI/CIVL it is planned to have an unique international scoring. A working
group of CIVL is planning details at the moment. We are in cooperation with
other XC systems like Leonardo, DHV-XC or CCP and look forward for an unique
system. For further information watch this page.

It seems quite strange that the DHV would implement two separate cross country
scoring systems, one for the national championship (based of Leonardo) and one
for "international" flights (based on this new software). But that's where
things stand. Maybe they did this because Andreas and Rudl had this new software
that they wanted used. Who knows?


To sign up for this competition, just click Registrations, NEW competitor
registration. You'll be asked for a user name and password, which is standard on
all these competitions. One thing unique here is that you'll be asked to type in
a six digit number that matches the one next to the box that you type that
number in. This is designed to keep out automated systems, but just why I'm not
clear on, and it is a pain to have to type in this different number every time
you log in.


You'll also note that you can only have one glider. I've been flying four
different gliders over the last few months, so the XC Competition will incorrectly state
that I was flying the Wills Wing T2-144 in Australia when I was flying the Moyes
Litespeed RS4. I hope that they fix this oversight in the future.


I was also unable to associate my club, Quest Air, with my "profile." It was on
the list of clubs (taken from the HOLC), but I couldn't get it to connect with
me.


Also there doesn't seem to be a way to access your "profile" assuming that there
is such an entity. You can see all your flights, click Select Scoring, "your
class," say Hang glider FAI 1, then click on your name to see your flights.


To claim a flight, click Flight Claim, and Browse for your IGC file. It seems
that I was also able to successfully load up an OLC file created with SeeYou,
but that the XC Competition didn't take the extra information that the OLC file provided
and I still had to enter take off location, country, etc. Not a big deal.


To see the current results of the XC Competition, click Select Scoring, then
your glider class, or overall results.


This contest appears to check the G record. I've got two flights up on it that
are marked as having a problem. one of them wasn't flagged by the other on-line
contests as troublesome, but one was flagged by the contest we'll discuss next.


I entered a couple of flights twice, but there doesn't seem to be a way to
delete the flights, like there was with Leonardo.


Leonardo also lets you upload a whole set of flights at once in a zip file
(which is how I got my first seventeen flights up on Leonardo), but you do need
to go in and edit the information that is attached to them a bit after you have
uploaded them.


Individual flight display is reasonably comprehensive and has the nice feature
of being able to animate the track log with a read out of the pertinent
information at each recorded point in the flight. The background is a vector
map, with no choices for satellite photos, bit map maps, etc., like you will
find with Leonardo and the XC Contest.


Click Home, on the menu, and you have a series of links to other on-lines
contests, language settings (German, English, Polish), and the HOLC rules. Well,
I can't see the rules now, so I wonder where they went.


A nice feature is a calendar on the left hand side, which if you click will
display the flights flown and logged on that day.

 

XC Competition is a new piece of software and it has a ways to go to catch up
with Leonardo, but has more features than the HOLC, with a few more "bugs"
(features that aren't quite right). It let me upload flights that it actually
had problems with, but indicated that they had problems. It's hard to say which
is the better way to handle this.


I look forward to improvements. It works well enough, if not perfectly.