[Richard Wallace]

Dave, I agree completely with your point of view.

My team has not used an off-board compressor (yet); in fact we've avoided pneumatics altogether for the last two seasons. My concern with this rule is the same as yours. I don't like to pick on teams needlessly during inspection.

At Waterloo this year, Tristan and I saw two teams with off-board compressors. One complied the the earlier inspection "welcome doc" guidance requiring a Spike but no pressure switch; the other had no Spike. In each case the team was pressurizing manually; i.e., by reading the storage pressure and manually switching the compressor off when it reached 120 psi.

We asked the team without a Spike feeding their off-board compressor to go look at how the other team had complied with the inspection checklist guidance: basically they had a mechanical switch enabling the Spike. We passed both teams after each had demonstrated apparently 'safe' pneumatic charging procedures.

During the next lead inspectors teleconference, several questions on the pneumatics requirements were raised. One of the most experienced lead inspectors pointed out that the inspection checklist guidance we had all been working from up to then was inconsistent with <R97>. Like you and probably many others, I had missed that. So had FIRST headquarters.

FIRST issued Team Update #18 to address this inconsistency. As I said earlier, it is now clear to me that the same pneumatics rules apply whether the compressor is on-board or off-board. But that was not clear to me when I was inspecting at STL and Waterloo.