Is the purpose of USPA to grow the sport, or to support activities that significant numbers of members engage in, while encouraging safe practices? Probably both, but maybe neither to the exclusion of the other. How would you regulate swooping if you were in charge — given that actual people actually do it. It was hard enough to get DZ’s to start enforcing traffic control areas, and that appears to have cut down on in-air collisions under canopy.
Yes, they have to adhere to certain standards to be USPA members, but since there are successful non-USPA DZ’s out there, the stick approach to enforcement won’t work for very long. Used to be that advertising in Parachutist was how people found out about DZ’s; with the net, that’s effectively useless.
Personally, I’d like to see the same sort of emphasis on minimum number of jumps and/or canopy classes before people are allowed to use the swoop lanes. It’d be a start. Forbidding swooping at commercial DZ’s is probably a non-starter.
It sounds like the most recent Eloy fatality was doing all the right things for education; swooping just doesn’t forgive mistakes, any more than proximity BASE does.
Wendy P.