http://www.scene.co.nz/dont-shoot-us-down/292192a1.page

Adventure-aviation veterans fear costly new regulations could
ground several Queenstown paragliding and hang gliding pilots.

New Civil Aviation Authority rules to regulate airborne thrills take effect in
November – but compliance costs could be an economic killer, the two veterans
predict.

Russell Read of Picton, longtime vice-president of the New Zealand Hang Gliding
& Paragliding Association, warns: “There’s going to be a net loss of adventure
paragliding services to tourists nationwide because of those (compliance) costs.

“They’re pretty unreasonable and there will be quite a large attrition rate, I’d
suspect, of operators closing down,” Read says.

Our main correspondent in New Zealand, Jim Rooney <<jim>>,
writes:

Ah yes... Part 115. Very similar to Sport Pilot in many ways. It
too was the regulation that "was never going to actually happen," and then it
did. Now 115, which was "never going to happen", is.

The article's pretty accurate. Dom's a friend of mine and a very level headed
guy.

Like Hugh was saying, the CAA decided they're going to do it... and that's that.
There was a public comment period, just like Sport Pilot, where we got to give
some feedback, and some of it was constructive, but everything complaining about
why this shouldn't happen went straight to the bin. The answer was pretty
clear... this is happening, deal with it.

It's going to be a big kick in the wallet, especially for the smaller operators.
The part about most Queenstown tandem pilots being owner/operators is not right
though. Most work for either Skytrek, Peak Tandems, Fly Paragliding or Gforce.
Gforce may be an anomaly as I think they're a consortium. I'm not sure if each
pilot will have to have an individual audit or if they'll all do one.

I think this is going to hit operators outside of Queenstown the hardest.
Outside Queenstown, the pilots do tend to be owner/operators.

Purely instructional tandems are exempt from this as I understand things. This
is about straight up commercial tandems. An idea very foreign to the US.