He doesn't get more distance, but does have the benefit of the bonus and avoiding a retrieve.

I would have pushed back hard on this, buit don't serve on the RC any more.

Grumpy

UH

The rule: MG can get a 25 point airport bonus if he starts his engine within 2 miles of a qualifying airport AND at 1,000 feet AGL or greater. If you want to pull out your engine on final, you won't get the bonus.

Why? The airport bonus for regular gliders is designed as a mild safety incentive. It usually works out that you are better off stopping if you're below about 1,500' rather than glide straight in to a field like the good old days.

The MG pilots made a persuasive case that the same safety incentive should be offered to them. Rather than, as JJ suggests, glide straight over unlandable terrain and pull out the iron horse at 200', 25 points suggests that you deviate towards an airport, and pull out the engine at a reasonable altitude. The latter decision especially has been the cause of many MG accidents.

Now, before everyone goes all safety-nazi and "legislate safety" on me, recall we do this for regular gliders. If you accept the principle of a small points bonus for deviating to an airport for regular gliders, it certainly makes sense to offer it to motor gliders. If you don't accept the principle, then it makes sense to abolish the airport bonus for all gliders.

Why not do it? As UH points out, MG "avoid a retrieve." Resistance to the MG bonus came mostly from pilots who see that MG have a definite competitive advantage in avoiding the exhaustion of retrieves, and denying them the bonus is a back door way to sneak in a little bit of a MG handicap penalty.

But that really doesn't make sense. Our official philosophy is we handicap based on aerodynamics. A uniform 1-2% handicap for a motor to offset this no-landout advantage might make sense, but then let's do it forthrightly and openly, not by means of the airport landing bonus. Also, MG could get the bonus by landing. Self-launchers could then take off and avoid the retrieve.. So the "penalty" only applied to turbos.

In sum: it surely makes sense to offer the same airport landing incentive to motor operation that we do to non-motor operations. And if it makes sense to add 1-2% handicap for retrieve avoidance, let's do that out in the open as a separate issue.

The one snag that our discussion brought up: Airport databases are incomplete, many "airports" are nonexistent or unsafe, and coordinates are not always accurate. For this rule, and many other reasons, paying a little bit of attention to the outlanding database before contests makes a lot of sense.


John Cochrane