They Are At It Again
I told you about the FAA messing with a whooping crane recovery program because they used an ultralight aircraft to mimic a mother bird taking young birds south, now they seem to have it in for sled dogs.
The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner reports that the Yukon Quest has had to cancel its volunteer pilots program because paying for the fuel the volunteers use in support of the Quest makes it a commercial enterprise. That’s why there is no dog drop between Circle and Eagle.
Eagle is connected to the rest of the world by the Yukon River and bush aircraft. In the winter that means that you need sled dogs or an airplane to move. Using a snowmobile is very chancy on the frozen Yukon, and fuel is not cheap when it is available.
This year any dogs dropped at Eagle will be taken to Dawson, because Canadian pilots can make the trip with a Canadian field at one end, but they can’t fly to another Alaskan location that has a road connection.
The Iditarod ‘Air Force’ has an exemption in place for a couple of more years, then they will have to jump through the hoops that the Quest is facing.
This is like requiring that the guys who drive the vehicles that pull floats in local parades have commercial licenses with a bus endorsement because there are people on the floats. Hell, with Mardi Gras floats you are lucky to find someone who isn’t too drunk to drive.
2 comments
This frustrates me to no end. Soon the rules of Mardi Gras will not allow ‘throws’ from the floats for insurance reasons. The FFA rules seem draconian. shame.
Get this – the neighboring city used to have parades end in my little town because there was a big parking lot available for people to sort things out that wouldn’t be blocked with the cars of parade viewers. My town’s insurance company said that we would have to pay increased premiums for ‘parade coverage’ even though the parade didn’t go through the town but used a state road to get to a private parking lot. The proposed premium was obscene, so we had to tell the city that they would have to re-route their parades.
Under the new route, things are severely cramped for the people viewing and for the moment of the floats.
Yeah, I can see an insurance company wanting a ‘bead injury’ rider for Mardi Gras parades, because insurance companies want to collect money, they don’t want to pay any out. They actually expect that someone will go to court for being pummeled by Moon Pies?
I assume that a commercial pilot complained, but no one offers anything approaching regular aircraft service to most of the checkpoints along the trail, as the traffic flow is too limited.