Awards (Page 5)

For the role he played in the Delport versus Aero Club/SAPFA court case. Without his assistance we surely would have been in for substantial losses.

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.

For the promotion of Sport Flying over a long period of time.

As far back in 1980’s Oom Doep has been involved in organising and assisting at flying events both locally at the Bloemfontein Flying Club as well as Nationally. He was involved with organising, marshalling, photographing and scoring at rally flying events. He acted as a starter of the World Rally Flying Championships held in Stellenbosch in 1991. He was also involved with arranging events which combined aircraft with the vintage car club.

Oom Doep du Plessis took part in his first Air Race in 1968 and was a participant for approximately 13 years. After flying his last race he decided to give something back and acted as a marshall for the Race. Together with Oom Doors Fonternel he has acted as starter for the Air Race since 1989. Air Race participants will long remember these gentlemen giving their demonstration of the start lights at the briefings for the Air Race and then sitting at the start (as pictured below). After acting as official starters for many years they decided to “retire” after the 2002 Air Race

Oom Doep (together with Kassie Kasselman) organised the 1989 Air Race and was involved with the development of the Air Race rules. It was one of his achievements to remove jet and turbo-prop aircraft from the Race.

Oom Doep du Plessis allowed his license to lapse in 2001. By that time he had accumulated approximately 4000 hours.