1) CELEBRATING SAFETY WITH A NEW HPAC/ACVL SAFETY AWARD
The first initiative will launch a new annual award: The Safety Award.  This award will formally recognize an HPAC/ACVL member who promotes safety, with their continuous exemplary safety conscious behaviour, or who promotes safety in other ways, such as initiatives or programmes that aid in creating risk awareness, safety-conscious decision making skills etc.

Eligibility: Any member in good standing with the Association can receive this award and it may be awarded to the same person more than once. The number of Safety Awards given in any year shall be determined by the Board of Directors but is generally only one. Any member can nominate a recipient for the Safety Award!

2) RECOGNITION OF THE FOUR MOST EXEMPLARY ACCIDENT REPORTS IN A SEASON WITH A FREE ONE-YEAR MEMBERSHIP
This second initiative is all about learning from our mistakes. To do that we first need to be able to analyze what went wrong in a particular situation and what we might have done to avoid it. For the Safety Committee to be able to improve our safety record, we first need to know the trends regarding things that are going wrong, so recommendations can be made to pilots about improvements in those areas.

All pilots are encouraged to submit an accident or incident report when involved in, or witnessing, an accident or incident. When you submit a particularly noteworthy report full of information, that will assist the Committee and other pilots in learning from what transpired, then you could be awarded with a free one-year membership when your membership expires next year! Report at https://www.hpac.ca/pub/?pid=50. Do please remember that the names of all accident report submitters will be kept in the strictest confidence by the Safety Committee.

A maximum of 4 accident and/or incident reports will be recognized each year.

Prior to next year’s Annual Directors Meeting, the Safety Committee will nominate the eligible four reports, two for hang gliding, and two for paragliding, that will be awarded with a free membership renewal for the following year.

With this initiative we are trying to encourage not only pilots involved in a accident or incident to report why and how they found themselves in their precarious situation, but also witnesses of the event. All reports will be screened and adjusted for privacy purposes and the intent is clearly not to lay blame, but to share those scary moments we had or were witness to, so that we can prevent them from happening again unnecessarily to others.

We are looking forward to receiving your Safety Award nominations and Accident and Incident reports!

RECENT EVENTS…..The HPAC/ACVL Safety Committee is currently investigating two serious events, one involving a fatality in water, and the other a tandem accident. These will be the subject of the next HPAC/ACVL Safety Advisory.

Suzanne Francoeur and Tyler Gillies, Safety Committee Co-Chairs
safety@hpac.ca