At 16:30 13 March 2005, wrote:
PS. It's not widely known, but you don't need to make
the 500 foot
minimum exactly at 1 mile. You will get a good finish
anywhere inside
the cylinder, just as soon as you pull up and climb
above the 500 foot
minimum. No penalty will apply, your clock just keeps
running for a few
more seconds. This interpretation has been blessed
by the rules
committee and the Byars scoring program works this
way.

Interesting JJ.

I checked an example to see if there's a competitive
advantage in diving for the cylinder. Let's say you
are at 900', 2 nm from the cylinder on a Mc=5 glide.
If you stay on this path you will reach the cylinder
in 75 seconds at 500'. If you choose to accelerate
to Mc=10, you will take about 60 seconds to reach the
cylinder at 50' with enough energy to pull up to 500'
with 60 knots (this includes time for the pullup).
You save 15 seconds, which is worth 1-2 points on a
2-3 hour task. Of course this leaves you a mile from
home with little airspeed or altitude since you used
what excess energy you would have had to go faster.
Goodness only knows what a pilot might do if his pullup
leaves him a bit short. According to KC one pilot ended
up spinning at low altitude - apparently trying some
similar maneuver. But it's all within the current rules
for finish cylinders.

JJ has observed more incidents with the gate - my personal
experience has seen a more issues with the cylinder.
Two examples come to mind from last year:

In one case a bunch of gliders all declared downwind
at once, even though they had finished several minutes
apart. It took some back and forth on the radio to
sort it out and some extended/shortened patterns. Normally
with a gate finish the arrival sequence does an okay
good job of setting up landing order. In this case
with finishers at all different altitudes, speeds and
directions, the '4 mile' call doesn't give you a very
good sense of who you're landing behind so we had to
sort it out all over again on downwind.

My second example involves a final course leg that
passed by a CB about 4 miles from the airport. Many
pilots held extra altitude until past the cell, then
dove for the cylinder. I finished several thousand
feet high and as I pulled up encountered another glider
with full divebrakes deployed to my left on a course
perpendicular to mine. Apparently he had finished even
higher and decided to let down by flying along the
edge of the cylinder. In my experience with gates most
finishers are going more or less the same direction
and are at more or less the same altitude for a given
speed. The cylinder seems to scatter this a fair bit
and generates more mixed traffic milling about on potentially
converging courses.

I'm not asserting that one form of finishing is inherently
safer than the other, just that they each have a set
of issues that require pilots to have good situational
awareness and exert reasonable judgement. I think
these are qualities that are not easily made up for
through legislation. I also strongly believe we should
defer to the judgement of the CD and the organizers
in setting up operations that suit the site - Parowan
is not Hobbs, Minden is different from Sugarbush.

Can you hear my knuckles dragging?

9B