On Sunday, January 3, 2016 at 10:15:36 PM UTC-5, Andy Blackburn wrote:
On Sunday, January 3, 2016 at 2:36:45 PM UTC-8, XC wrote:

9B,

Obviously you are trying to goad me on with that last comment. I'll bite.

Some of us still believe that looking at clouds and terrain, finding thermals yourself, is an important part of the sport. Throughout these threads this is still a lot of talk overstated talk about safety that is covering for what some folks really want, to buddy-fly their way around the race course.

BB has even said leading out is a losing strategy. Strange, champions of the past weren't afraid to lead out. Is this the way we are heading?

FLARM with stealth as it is now really works well in a contest setting for collision avoidance. Those who claim otherwise have largely never tried it and/or want (need) to see others to make their way around the race course. Seems kind of weak-assed in my opinion.

Still waiting to hear what you think our sport should be about. You are on the RC. I'd like to know your vision on where we are going. What parts are essential to the sport?

Should we keep the part about not running a motor? Or should we allow folks to run their motors for 2 five minute periods? This would arguably be safer and those who maybe didn't get enough practice in could stay competitive on the score sheet longer. Still seems like an arbitrary limit, though.

I'd hate to limit engine technology. If we only allow 10 minutes of engine time they better count. I'd want to get some good performance out of my engine. All this too can be part of the undefined future of our sport.

XC

Hey Sean,

Wasn't trying to goad you particularly. It was more philosophical - but I know you're always up to the philosophical challenge.

My vision for the sport. Okay, pressure's on...

I think soaring competitions (or contests - note that I don't say "race", which is an important sub-part of the skills needed in soaring competition, but not the whole) should test a number of skills, all of which are related to the ability to make distance over the ground, primarily in a minimum amount of time, all without benefit of propulsion by means of stored energy (gasoline, electrons, rubber bands, nuclear reactors, etc.) and without proprietary assistance from others (that is, it needs to be your performance (philosophy on two-seaters will need its own thread).

While there are a wide array of skills that contribute to being good at achieving the above objective, I think the paramount skill is the ability to make optimal strategic and tactical decisions with complex information inputs under uncertainty. This boils down to two basic tenets. Tenet 1: Don't pick sub-par climbs and, Tenet 2: Don't get so low that you can't pick the thermal you want. Fundamentally, we are testing pilots' abilities to trade off these two tenets. In flight this boils down to two types of decisions, 1) which line will have the best energy and 2) should I stop and climb here or press on in hope of finding better lift (BB has written quite eloquently on the latter item in his "A little faster please" article - if you haven't, read it. It includes a lot on decisions about altitude and thermal lift distribution versus the "stop to climb" decision and upwind/downwind/crosswind starts and turnpoint decisions). In general, the more complex and varied the information inputs involved in testing that ability, the better and more accurate the test of soaring skills.

In constructing soaring competitions, they need to be subject to a constraint of fairness, which is: every pilot needs the same opportunity to make the same in-flight tradeoff decisions. Note that this does not necessarily mean that every pilot needs to make the exact same flight in a giant bomber formation. Now, some people will argue that if every glider isn't flying in exactly the same air at exactly the same time random and unpredictable differences in weather can make all the difference and that's all luck. I can sympathize and understand this perspective and agree that some poorly thought through logic can end up looking pretty clever if the unexpected happens weather-wise, but generally I think better pilots are better at reading the weather and integrating macro and micro level forecasts and weather clues into their decision-making. This to me is an important skill that comes into play whether your rage of course line flexibility is 5 miles or 50 miles.

There is an element of risk tolerance that figures into all of this that I personally think needs to go so far but no further in terms of contests encouraging or accepting "bet your life" or "bet your glider" decisions. A significant amount of risk is inevitable, but I don't see willingness to take on risk - or belief that you can pull off risky decisions when others can't or won't - as a skill set we want to test for its own sake. I don't think we should try to eliminate every landout or risk of landout no matter what. There is plenty of time to be lost just by taking a 2 knot thermal instead of a 4-knot thermal and pilots will press for the better climb as their comfort-level dictates. But ensuring that a pilot at 1000' desperate for a climb has to put into a field doesn't do anything to improve how we judge soaring performance, in fact every landout just complicates matters because we have to translate miles to miles per hour (or more exactly translate both to points with formulas that arbitrarily weight the two metrics differently). If we can't compare performance exactly then it undermines the validity of the results. We tolerate this because we have to - landouts are inevitable but the ideal goal would be to challenge pilots' decision-making skills to the maximum without having to figure out how many points a mike is worth.

So what are the skills we want to test? My view (in order of importance):

1) Ability to make decisions about the optimal path to fly to achieve the best speed over the course - this can include small deviations to maximize energy, places to look for lift based on terrain, clouds or other indicators (like gliders or raptors climbing) and macro decisions about where to go when task flexibility is greater (as in AAT and MAT formats).

2) Ability to best estimate how to make use of the available lift in terms of when to climb, when to press on, when to cruise or dolphin.

(I go back and forth on the priority order between 1 and 2)

3) Ability to understand weather and how it affects likely task performance at the micro-level and macro-level both in terms of forecast weather and weather dynamics over the course of the day, including the ability to integrate new information as weather changes. Note that 3) interplays with 1) on many days.

4) Ability to extract the most energy out of lift sources. This includes thermalling technique, search technique, etc.

5) Stick skills - the ability to fly at the right speed, right flap setting, right bank angle, judge the final glide, not crash into a ridge, etc. I see these as table-stakes for flying, but not something we are trying to test explicitly. Leave that to the Red Bull racing pilots.

I'm sure there are other things I am forgetting so I reserve the right to revise my list.

So, how does this vision for the sport affect philosophy for technology like Flarm and ADS-B? They are at the simplest level another source of information that needs to be balanced against and integrated with other information inputs. More information puts more pressure on good decision-making ("go for the cu on course or the glider climbing a mile off course in the blue?" is a more complex decision than "go for the cu on course - it's all you've got").

Sure, some pilots may decide that they can latch onto others decisions and more Flarm range may give them more opportunity to try, but all the evidence is that if you are borrowing someone else'd decisions without even knowing what they are deciding it's very hard to perform well, except in some very narrow scope. There are just too many variables and they change way too dynamically to blindly follow and win most of the time. Even if it were possible to use more information about other gliders I don't believe this fundamentally changes the sport - other gliders are just more information. If it is true that you can win just by following then we are all fools not to fly the gaggle all the time, regardless of technology enablers. If we don't like the gaggle, we should change how we score and set up tasks (and maybe penalize leeching - it's pretty easy) rather than scapegoating technology. These practices pre- and post-date every technology shift. It's not about technology and technology doesn't significantly alter the balance - I looked for it.

I feel the same way about weather data - so long as we confirm that it is reasonably available to all at affordable cost. It gives more information for complex tradeoff decisions rather than flying blindly. Why flying blindly is viewed as a skill totally escapes me. Guts to press into a thunderstorm without knowing what's ahead? It's not a "skill" I think soaring contests should be testing.

Hope that's a decent start at a reply.

9B
Andy Blackburn
RC "Revolutionary"

Thanks for taking the time to reply. I agree with almost everything you've said about priorities. Our two view points differ in one fundamental way that I can think of. I believe we should be measuring these same abilities with the pilot and glider taken as one system competing against and amongst other pilots. Pulling in more and more information from people outside the glider just means you are using their abilities. This homogenates not differentiates pilots abilities in my view.

You'll see as time goes on that people are talking more and more about the FLARM thermal values. When you hear this you know that the pilot was able to pick one thermal over another based on someone else's analysis of that thermal. They never had to size up the look of the cloud or sample the air that was already done for them, This is already happening.

Do you believe we should be able to talk to people on the ground during competitions? Serious question. Can I have an expert glider pilot with a bank of computers coach me through the flight? That would be an example of having more information to balance. I think that is nuts but they are all about it at the Worlds.

Enough on that now I have to respond to VW.

XC