Are you concerned that all the Mexican pilots on their national team had to take a drug test in Mexico before they went to the 2007 Worlds in Big Spring, Texas? One pilot was very concerned about marijuana residues.

How about the Italian hang glider pilots penalized at the Europeans in 2008 for altitude restriction violations, restrictions that they are adamant that they never violated and then later it turns out that the altitude restriction system is very poorly understood by CIVL and anyone else in hang gliding and still hasn't been agreed upon?

Maybe you don't care if you have a private sphere, or maybe that you use to have one. Maybe it is so long gone that you forgot it use to be different.

Now when we compete we carry around a little recording device, and recently it has become a 3D recording device. We started requiring competitors to carry 3D GPSes in category 1 competitions and therefore we made it possible to at least try to think about how to restrict their altitude. We've done it badly once. Will it get better or worse in the future?

We wouldn't have to worry about this if you weren't required to carry that little tracking device. Sure it makes things a lot easier for the pilot, a great benefit and surely a reason for its rapid adoption. But after the great benefit others think of other things to do with it that are not so much a great benefit.

And maybe this opens up another pathway to control. Maybe these people realize that they have to require an even more sophisticated instrument, and the perfectly fine one you have now won't do the next time you go to a major competition, because the people in charge want to track you even more closely.

So what could they do with your GPS in the interests of safety? Think about it. They are trying to keep you out of the margins of restricted airspace for fairness, safety, and legal reasons (or so they say). But isn't there a much bigger safety issue? Couldn't (shouldn't) they be concerned about this much bigger safety issue first?

Well, in case you haven't guessed what I'm referring to it is the common practice of flying hang gliders far past their VNE speeds, especially on final glide. And it is so easy to use the tracklog from a Flytec 6030/Compeo+  or GPS to determine your air speed (just subtract the wind speed, which SeeYou does automatically).

Wait, you say, no one is going to go in and give us a zero for the day for exceeding VNE. Hmmm?! Well maybe this guy would: http://ozreport.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=15271&start=1 .

Oh, and you say that the measurement wouldn't be accurate? Well, has that stopped them when it comes to altitude measurements? I don't think so.

The problem is that they (we) know too much about each other, now that we have this tracking device on our person. And once the data is available (say on the internet) then the whole world can see when we are doing something that is "wrong." Like when the Northeast Victorian paragliding club saw that we were violating the margins of the airspace near Gundaring during the 2007 Bogong Cup, and made sure that we would be penalized if we did that again. Otherwise they would shut down the Bogong Cup.

You can't run and you can't hide.

So you say that you trust the French Anti Doping Agency (or North Eastern Victorian paraglider pilots)? I don't. Why should it be a matter of trust?