Aero Club of South Africa – Gold Wings – Dirk de Vos
For his commitment to competitive aviation in his capacity as scorer for the President’s Trophy Air Race over a number of years.
Dirk de Vos joind Unisys (foremerly Burroughs Computers) in 1984 in Bloemfontein after spending sis years in the SA Air Force. His my manager at the time, got him involved in car rallies, both in marshalling and scoring. The organiser of most of these rallies got hime involved in scoring an inter-provincial air rally towards the end of 1989 and, a few months later, an inter-provincial precision event, both held in Bloemfontein.
This then led to the scoring of the Air Race in 1990. At that time the scoring system was run in Lotus 123, developed by Danie du Plessis in Lotus 123. Dirk decided to run the system on a Unisys CTOS system running PC emulator both for the speed and the extra functionality provided by CTOS. There were a large number of problems which he managed to fix.
Dirk thought that scoring for the Air Race was going to be for one event only but somehow he inherited the job permanently. Dirk has acted as scorer for all Air Races since that year.
In 1991 Dirk decided to decided to write his own scoring system. Being a technician and not a programmer, this task kept him busy deep into the night virtually every night for six weeks as he had to learn to use the development software used to write the scoring system and, at the same time, develop the system as well.
Over the years Dirk has developed the system and has introduced an interface with Windows directly by adding the functionality to write out the results and awards directly into HTML format.
Dirk has also remained involved in the scoring of other rally flying and precision events, including the World Rally Flying Championships held in 2003.