Squadrons: Sharing Private Contests with a Group

A squadron is a group of people: a flying club, a national team, a training group, or just the friends you fly with. You share a private contest with the squadron once, and everybody in it can see the contest and take part in it.

When should I use a squadron?

Use one when a contest should not be open to the whole world, but more than a handful of people need to be in. Typical cases:

Situation	What to do
A club championship that only the club members should see and fly in	Make a squadron of the club members, keep the contest private, share it with the squadron.
Training camp or team selection for a national team	One squadron for the team, share each training contest with it.
Several organizers run events for the same group of pilots	Everybody who manages a contest can share it with the same squadron.
An open event anybody can watch	You do not need a squadron. Make the contest public.
One person needs to look at your contest	Give that person access in the Contest access window of the contest, no squadron needed.

What a squadron member can do

When a contest is shared with a squadron, every member can:

see the contest, its tasks (also the private ones), the live map and the results, and find it on their dashboard,
take part: register a team, book a start time and fly.

Members cannot manage the contest. They cannot edit it, change tasks, run the scheduler or share it further. Managing a contest is still given to people one by one in Contest access.

Being in a squadron does not give anybody access to anything else of yours, and it does not make anything public.

Roles in a squadron

Role	Can do
Member	See and take part in the squadron’s contests, leave the squadron, take away the contests they added themselves.
Admin	Everything a member can, plus invite and remove people, make others admin, edit the name and description, make an invite link, and take away any contest.

The person who creates the squadron is its first admin. A squadron always has at least one admin.

Step by step

1. Create the squadron

Log in and open Squadrons in the navigation bar.
Under Start a squadron give it a name people will recognize, and a short description of who it is for. Press Create.

Any logged-in user can create a squadron, you do not need to be an organizer.

2. Get people in

Open the squadron and use one of:

Invite by name or e-mail. Search for somebody who already has an account, or type an e-mail address. They get an e-mail and see the invitation under Squadrons when they log in. They join when they press Join.
Invite link. Press Create an invite link and post the link in your group chat. Anybody who is logged in and opens it can join as a member. Anyone with the link can use it, so switch it off or make a new link when it has been shared too widely.

There are two ways, and the result is the same:

From the contest: open the contest, then Contest access → Squadrons, choose the squadron and press Share.
From the squadron: under Contests choose one of the contests you manage and press Add.

You can only share contests you manage. Any member of a squadron who manages a contest may share it with that squadron. The same contest can be shared with several squadrons; people who are in more than one see it once.

Use Stop sharing on the contest, or Remove on the squadron’s contest list. You can always take away a contest you manage or one you added. A squadron admin can take away any contest from the squadron. The members lose access immediately, unless the contest is public or they have been given access in another way.

Good to know

Making the contest public makes the squadron unnecessary. Everybody can see a public contest. The squadron is for contests that stay private.
Private tasks are visible too. People with access to a private contest see all its tasks. If you need to hide a task from the pilots until a briefing (for example at a championship), do not share the contest with the squadron until then, or keep the task in a contest that is not shared.
Someone who leaves a squadron loses access to the contests that came through it. A member can leave at any time from the squadron page.
Deleting an account hands the squadron over to its longest-standing member if the person was its only admin.
Privacy: members see each other’s names, but e-mail addresses only in a masked form.

Questions

Pilots say they cannot see my contest. Check that the contest is shared with the squadron (Contest access → Squadrons), and that the pilot has accepted the invitation and is listed under the squadron’s members.

Can a squadron be used instead of a club? They are different things. A club is a pilot’s affiliation shown on results. A squadron only decides who may open a private contest.

Can I see which contests I can open through my squadrons? Yes. The Squadrons page lists them with the squadron that gives you access.