This will be an overview of some of the recent activities at CIVL, as well as some of the focus areas in the coming months leading up to the Plenary. Some of this update will already be known to delegates and pilots in the committees, but we know that tracking everything is difficult and there are lots of pilots who aren’t part of the working groups but still deserve to know what’s happening and have an opportunity to give feedback.

Since the call we put out to pilots who are interested to join the committees and working groups a lot volunteered. For example we’ve had over 80 people joining the Cross country committee, and we are very grateful for their willingness to participate.

Data and Incident Reporting

The main focus recently has been on topics related to safety, and better incident reporting is an active topic of conversation in the Safety Committee and elsewhere. In some competitions we get good data back from the organization, but in the majority the information is incomplete. Over the years, many attempts have been made to get more in-depth and complete information by updating the tools used to collect it, but this still isn’t giving us the data we need. Paul Hogan from Ireland summed it up well when he said “Without a culture of reporting all incidents and near misses, the depth of data collection will not help to enable CIVL to preempt major incidents and fatalities”  So in addition to an active discussion on how to improve the data collection tools, we will need to improve the community’s awareness and willingness to provide accurate data.
As for the tools, for those that don’t know, organizers must now send in incident reports any time they submit the results of a Cat 2 competition to CIVL for WPRS ranking. Without the incident reports, the submission isn’t accepted. But Violeta Jimenez and others are proposing to enhance the system with some additional items that will allow better analysis and action. There are a lot of motivated, smart people working on this now and we are confident that the result will be much better data and along with the increased cooperation from safety officers and organizers and pilots, we’ll be in a better position to do meaningful analysis.

Other Safety Initiatives

Meanwhile, there are already some areas that can improve safety that are well known. We’ve formed a new working group of Organizers and Meet officials to gather best practices and create a common training program that can used to educate and eventually “certify” Meet Directors, Safety Directors, Task Setters, and Live Tracking managers. Some countries already have programs like this in place. Maxime Bellemin from France and Lope Morales Gonzalez (Spain) have provided their programs and they will be used as the foundation, along with the ideas and contributions from many others, that we will build on.  The goal here is twofold: 1) Better consistency from one competition to the next with respect to coordination and practices of meet officials and 2) Share knowledge so that all meet organizations can operate at a higher level. For Cat 1 competitions, this will result in NAC/Organizers having to provide a fully certified team for any bid.

Task Setters: This is a role that is currently optional in both Cat 1 and Cat 2 competitions. There is a proposal that will be considered at the upcoming plenary to make this role mandatory for all HG and PG Cat 1 competitions. Good task setting is one of the most critical aspects that affect safety, and as you all know currently it is a part time job done by pilots chosen from among the competitors. The Task Setter will be a member of the Organization, and will not be a pilot flying in the competition. Their job will start long before the competition begins, and they will develop a set of safe tasks (and thus goals) that can be drawn from during the competition. There will still be a group of pilots that can work with the task setter, but they will be in an advisory role. Pilots are there to compete, and that is where their focus rightfully needs to be. All tasks will still have to be approved by a pilot safety committee and the Meet Director.

In addition to the group of organizers and meet officials, added doctors to the working group, including Gerhard Steinberg from Germany and Justin Grisham from the USA who will work on updating the minimum requirements for medical / rescue capabilities at competitions, as well as creating some best practices such as where best to deploy resources during the race  (in combination with pre-set tasks). The idea is that these materials can then be used to train the staff at competitions who will be assisting in the retrieve and rescue activities.

The CCC working group, at Luc Armant’s suggestion, has restarted and has lots of new designers and pilots participating. They are discussing potential changes to the CCC standard that could improve safety. There are also discussions happening in the HG & PG XC committee on other measures that could help make final glides safer such as elevated goals, and/or changes to the ESS. The discussion is incredibly technical, so I’m not going to attempt to summarize it, but suffice it to say that a lot of smart pilots and designers from many companies are spending a considerable amount of time working on ways to keep pilots safer.

One small, but potentially impactful, proposal that will be voted at the upcoming plenary is to disallow new goal fields from being added after a competition has been started. This, along with enhanced documentation requirements (including video) of all goal fields, could have a very positive impact on improving safety.

For those who are not aware, last year a working group was formed to create a new specification for competition paragliding harnesses. This addresses some of the usability and safety related issues we’ve seen with the various latest generation of harnesses. That standard was passed at the Plenary earlier this year, and manufacturers are now using it as a guide for developing their next generation. We are now working on the back protector aspect: EN is going to release a new standard but we are considering the idea to make it even more strict for competition harnesses, used by definition by pilots who push to the limit.

Many of the topics above span both Hang Gliding and Paragliding, but there have also been Hang Gliding specific discussions. The Hang gliding Committee led by Barbara Sonzogni has got a significant increase of members and now also includes a fair  representation of Class 5 pilots. The committee has raised the questions of pilots' preparation level, selection process, new pilots training and sport development. Also currently there is a series of online meetings of Hang Gliding experts going on, which focus on the questions of FAI 1 bids evaluation, safety concepts assessment as well as future actions to develop HG Classes in general. Regina Glas has made a number of important observations and suggestions based on her experience and the latest Hang Gliding World Championships in Ager. In the next update, we will spend more time discussing some of the Hang Gliding specific work being done.

Better Communication

The suggestion was made by several people that we should reach out more to pilots directly to get feedback on proposals and bids, as well as just doing a better job of explaining what we are doing. These are excellent ideas. As you may have seen in the recent announcement soliciting Category 1 bids for the upcoming plenary, we are going to solicit pilot feedback on the bids so that the delegates can take that into account during selection. As well there is a proposal to create FAI 1 bid scoring so that we have a clearer overview when evaluating it.

We are also going to do pilot surveys on proposals. One that you will see soon is a survey on the new Sport Class wing definition that the Sport Class working group is developing, and on Sport Class competitions in general.

As always, you are welcome to join one or more of the working groups directly, as well as give feedback through your delegate, but we will also be seeking pilot feedback on all significant proposals. The timing for having proposals finalized prior to the Plenary this year will be pushed back to allow time to get pilot feedback.

Other Topics

The 1st FAI Hike and Fly Championship is coming in 2027, and the Hike and Fly committee has been discussing things such as how to score multi-day tasks. There will be 20 Cat2 Hike & Fly events this year. Many people in the working group contributed to getting this new discipline defined and launched, but in particular I want to call out Thomas Senac for his amazing work as committee chair, shepherding the process to where we are today in a relatively short amount of time.

The 13th World Paragliding Accuracy Championships are going on right now (unless you are reading this after the middle of October 2025). We’ll have more updates on what’s happening in PG accuracy and aerobatics in the next update.

CIVL owns a set of trackers that it makes available to all Cat 1 organizers free of charge. For years this served us well and Flymaster has put an amazing amount of uncompensated work into building out the tracking and retrieval system we’ve all grown accustomed to. Lives have been saved with it. But there is now a new generation of trackers on the market that have features such as 2-way communication that we need to be using. When we bought our trackers back in 2018, Flymaster was the only game in town. But as there are now new vendors in the market that we need to consider, we will need to have an open process for bidding, plus we have to decide whether renting or buying makes the most sense. For the short term, since the main focus needs to be safety, we have decided to rent new trackers rather than spend time on a lengthy bidding and evaluation process. We also have a discussion about a framework that would allow better interoperability. There will be more in future updates on these topics.

Finally, as you saw in the announcement from FAI, there is a pause on CAT 1 events in Paragliding and Hang Gliding while we work on safety enhancements. The first Cat 1 event next year is the PanAmerican Championship in April. The original plan was to cancel this event, but before doing so we asked for and got feedback from the delegates in the Americas. The majority of them said that they would like for the event to still happen and asked for more time for CIVL to work with the organizer and CBVL to put additional safety measures in place. So as a result, we have delayed the final decision. We will be discussing and working on this over the coming months and will keep pilots updated on the process.
OK, there is a lot more going on, but this update is already too long. We will make them more frequent and spread the focus to other areas of activity in future updates. We are also going to schedule a couple of online video sessions to get questions and feedback from delegates and pilots. A poll for scheduling them will be out shortly.

A huge thank you from the Bureau (and on behalf of all competition pilots) to the volunteers in the Committees and Working Groups for the incredible work that they do. If you want to join them or have any questions you’d like addressed in future updates, email civl_comps @ fai.org