On Sunday, January 26, 2014 2:44:11 PM UTC-8, Sean F (F2) wrote:

I'll ask some questions this time around: Was this kids final glide decision safe or unsafe? Is successfully pulling off this kind of low finish fun or too risky? Is it a good thing for the sport of soaring or is it a bad thing? Is it good for soaring in the USA? Is it good for growing US contest participation or bad? Etc.

Sean - It's pretty easy to tell when you're trolling.

It's pretty simple:

If you make it it was safe, if you brake your glider it was unsafe, if you die or kill someone it was really unsafe.

Trouble is you can't predict ahead of time - otherwise what you dial into the glide computer 40 miles out would be pretty much exactly what you see when you cross the finish. Saying that it's the PIC's job to manage the risk is a bit of a misuse of language. Risk is by definition the part that you can't manage - it's the pilot's job to decide if (s)he wants to take a risk or not - with imperfect information. We can set the system up such that lots of risks are allowed or not, with winning on the line against a small, but impossible to calculate probability that the risk that can win the day might also end in catastrophe. Sometime it does - not because the pilot was unskilled or dumb, but because (s)he was just unlucky despite skilled piloting.

Having watched a friend (on the US World Team) put a final glide with a bit of extra sink between the high and low wires at the airport boundary and having pulled the shattered wreckage of my glider off a road while they carted my Dad (a 10,000 hour experimental test pilot) off to the hospital for a 5-month stay from which he never totally recovered I have to say that I don't really see the point of the sport to see how close we can fly to obstacles without chickening out.

So my view is some reasonable structures in how the game is set up are appropriate. It needs to strike a balance and be appropriate to the circumstances - terrain, airport, number of competitors, experience levels, glider performance. This thread started with a contention that there is dangerous behavior (circling low) that needs to be addressed in the rules, rather than left to pilot judgement, so there is some agreement that the rules shouldn't tempt people to take unnecessary risks - we just have to decide which ones and how to do it with the minimum possible impact on the enjoyment of the sport.

This is from a guy who had JJ yell at me more than once for doing beatups at contests.

But that's just me.

9B