On Sunday, January 25, 2015 at 9:41:34 PM UTC-8, Sean Fidler wrote:
Back then (I believe) the gliders were of vastly different performance with no handicaps (correct me if I am wrong here). That is very different from todays pure classes (15, 18, Open, Std, 20m 2 place even Club and 13.5m)..

Way back before 15M you had Std Cirrus, Libelle, LS-1, then you had ASW-19, LS-4, Discus (a bit later) and LS-3, ASW-20, Ventus (over a window of time). Take a look at the current handicaps for these ships and I believe you'll find a pretty tight handicap range. Yes you had the occasional Austria or Ka-6 or HP-14 turning up but generally with fewer generations of (particularly glass) in existence the spacing of performance felt reasonably tight.


The only possible salvation is OUTLAWING short MATs.

Be careful what you wish for - one potential outcome is more cancelled contest days or VERY short ATs or AATs with more devaluation. With uncertain weather you have to think about what CDs and advisors are going to do if you tie their hands that way. It seems unlikely that they will be able to wish their way to better weather so they will deal with it potentially with more conservative calls. One potential outcome given today's crewless environment is that calling more ATs will translate into fewer on-course hours per contest as CD's compensate for the AT's lack of pilot flexibility with more grid squatting waiting for conditions to improve and shorter tasks - especially should AT's be mandated in some way.

You might be well advised to reach out to CD's and/or advisors for a sample of contests where lots of TATs or no-turn MATs were called. I'm thinking it might be rather difficult to recreate the richness of information that was available to those calling tasks at the time and even spending several hours per contest day reviewing whatever data was available prior to launch (not after) might yield an incomplete or distorted version of the information that was used to make the task call. I didn't fall into either category (CD or advisor) last year but I'd be happy to review what actually happened each day at Montague and Nephi last year. There was a fair amount of weather uncertainty in both cases and at least for Montague an explicit goal of calling 1/3 AT's if the weather cooperated. It didn't cooperate except on a couple of days, including the last where we had an exquisitely called (drum roll) Long MAT.

Could more AT's be called - sure. I'm reasonably sure that pushing it hard will result in shorter races on average. That may be okay as a break from the longer days and will also have more leeching and tight finishes/speeds/scores. In the end, the contests will likely be decided on the days when pilot have to judge the weather too and the points spreads are greater. The AT days will be the days where excellent tactics can pick up a few points but mostly they will be days to play it safe and not stray away from the pack.

Also keep in mind that pushing the landout dimension too hard as part of implementing more ATs may result in more pilots elect to go to the OLC events like Nephi and Ionia are doing in 2015.

9B