SAFA Skysailor Magazine

10 SKY SAILOR December-January-February | SUMMER 2025 History When I arrived in Tasmania in 2004, there were so few free flyers that pretty much all site arrangements were based on personal relationships for an individual and a few mates. Flying from Parks land was handled by popping into a local Parks office and just letting them know our intentions. We were so few, and the flights infrequent enough, that this sufficed. Prior to this, hang gliding had been banned from the Northern Tiers near Poatina Headrace due to some earlier and since ‘lost in the fog of history’ concerns. In 2009, the new Parks Management Regulations prohibited aircraft from taking off or landing in the Reserve Estate, but this was not communicated to the Parks staff or to the THPA, and we carried on flying with the ad hoc verbal notification and assumed tacit permission. As before, our pilot density was low and we weren’t causing any ripples, it seemed to be working. The Regulations were revised in 2019, and with an eye on the drone menace, a definition of aircraft was included which included all free flying machines with absolutely no wiggle room. We had to do something, and quite quickly an Authority was negotiated with Parks and Wildlife that gave us explicit permission to fly from nine key wilderness sites for three years. The problem with this explicit permission was that by inference we no longer had tacit permission for any of our other Re- served Estate sites. In May 2023, with our Authority expiring in September 2023, we started the negoti- ation process for its replacement. The path was long and torturous, but in May 2024 we had a new Tasmania-wide Business License. The License as it stood was less than ideal, but it left the door open to discuss with the operational staff how they wished to manage our free flying. The art of not being special