On Saturday, January 27, 2018 at 12:36:09 PM UTC-8, Andy Blackburn wrote:
On Friday, January 26, 2018 at 2:01:01 PM UTC-8, John Cochrane wrote:

Specified ridge routes, where ridge soaring less than 500 feet over the valley floor, are carved out. The SUA stops short of the ridge in such areas.

John Cochrane

I'll nitpick the carve-out for ridge routes less than 500' above the valley floor. You don't want pilots stuck between the ridge and an SUA that they can't get over. Also, how low off the top of the ridge are you going to carve? Not every ridge day lets you fly over the crest. Once you make exceptions it means that someone has to go through and design the exceptions. Plus, ridge routes aren't the only gotchas.

There are other specific areas and situations I can think of that are problematic. Some of you will recognize them if you've flow the area. They are mostly equivalent to the Lake Tahoe example Jon mentioned - unlandable escarpments where the actual landout options require clearing the edge of the escarpment: 1) The Scofield Island turnpoint on the Wasatch plateau and most of the territory to the north of it in the Nephi task area, 2) the 20 miles of unlandable plateau to the west of the Wayne Wonderland turnpoint to the east of Parowan, 3) much of the escarpment south of Brian Head where the landouts are either a long glide down to Kanab, or though a canyon out to Cedar City or Hurricane, 4) most of the territory east of Mount Shasta as well as the wide, low pass that gets you to the home valley in the Montague task area, 4) the entire upper valley on the other side of the ridge by New Castle - if you shoot the gap you have an easy glide to the airport, but you have to clear the gap. It's a common finish route so you have to use the lower airport valley as the floor of the hard deck, but that leaves the upper valley without a hard deck. I've been low there and at least one contest accident was there IIRC.

Now, you could ignore these areas and just leave them without hard decks so that you don't have to have an expert committee of local racing pilots go through the entire task areas crafting custom SUA files for every single gotcha. In any case all of this would require a lot of education of pilots that being above the hard deck is not the same as having a landout option. I've done the landout option exercise using GlidePlan to set minimum altitude rings for the entire Montague task area based on a reasonable glide angle (35:1) to a known landing spot (mostly airports, but also landouts I scouted to fill the "no landing option" gaps). It's a sobering exercise - particularly when the task area is significantly unlandable). It also leads to a map that requires careful study to use effectively in real-world situations - situations where your mental energy might be better spent on other things.

While I wouldn't recommend it, theoretically we could contemplate setting SUAs so that every square mile of a task area always had a glide to a known good landing spot - or even an airport. It's how I typically fly and I know I pay a price for it competing with pilots who don't. Many times I watch other pilots dive into areas where I know there are no good landing options, only to connect with 8-knot climbs while I'm taking 2.5 knots back where it's safe - for me at least. I don't find any thrill in contemplating getting away with that kind of dice-rolling.

More broadly, since I've actually attempted this exercise myself as described above, I don't think it's all that easy for pilots to interpret a set of SUA's that are set up to regulate altitude from a top-down-view moving map display. Most SUA's are set to restrict horizontal position. We have class A, but that's the same everywhere so there's no looking at your altitude, then the map to find the local hard deck, followed by a search for the next lowest step, then back out to try to determine if the lower step that might buy you an extra 500-1000' in hard deck clearance actually takes you away from landout options, rather than towards them. I could easily see uneven terrain that encourages pilots to "circle the drain" of SUAs into areas that are more hazardous rather than less.

Lastly, mostly these ideas are intended to deal with relatively rare behavior and (if I hear people correctly) not even an attempt to stop that behavior, but simply the competitive impact of dice-rolling to win. If that's the case more selective and focused use of SUAs for specific risky behavior at specific locations that has an obvious competitive benefit might be a better way to go. Sergio's elevator at Lake Tahoe is pretty clearly one that I just won't do unless I'm high enough to avoid a lake landing. I've seen many flight traces of pilots who effectively committed to ditching if the elevator wasn't working - or their motor working (that one's a whole new thread).

It's not really clear to me whether there is even clarity on the objective here. It could be: 1) Discourage pilots from ever getting out of glide range to an airport, 2) Discourage pilots from ever getting out of glide range of a laudable spot, 3) Discourage pilots from circling too low in an attempt to make a save for points (but only for cases where the pilot doesn't also care about avoiding a retrieve, in which case a penalty wouldn't matter), 4) Stop pilots from placing well in contests from doing 1, 2, or 3 - but which one? For the record, I think 1, 2 or 3 either aren't practical to implement or aren't ineffective incentives, and 4 depends on on having some sort of sense of which types of behavior are specific, intentional acts of risk taking for competitive advantage. I don't think making a low save falls into the category of an intentional act very often. If you're that low most often your day is shot. The Lake Tahoe example is a notable exception - maybe we should focus on that.

It's a complex topic.

Andy Blackburn
9B

Andy, I hate it when you are the voice of reason . My motivation is to prevent having to fly blatantly unsafely in order to feel competitive. I don't do it, and I'm not competitive. There are guys who are always going to be faster than me on skill alone, I accept that. There are other guys who are willing to take far more chances and are faster because of it. There is some overlap in the two groups. I've become pretty good at predicting which of the latter will eventually come to grief (a skill honed in the old hang gliding days when I lost perhaps 20 friends in just a few years).

Dan's point from before is that contests are usually won with consistency, but the way the scoring is done (as stated in Dave's article) if a guy gets a lucky and unsafe save on a day when many landout safely, that one event can change the finish order dramatically. Maybe changes to the scoring methods address the problem more simply. For example throwing out the best and worst score for each pilot, or using a low points scoring system as they do in sailing regattas. That tends to reward consistent performance above one lucky or unlucky day. There is always the possibility that one pilot will win with a series of unlikely and dangerous low saves, but that is far less probable than the order changing due to just one.

Sergio's elevator is a good example. I know several pilots who will attempt to utilize that when the rest of us will be in Carson. I also know one pilot who died there trying, and another who didn't make it out of the basin. I've seen a number exit through Spooner barely clearing the tops of the cars on the highway, a few more feet of sink and they'd have had a mid air with a truck. There are other ways to address that simpler than a hard deck, for example a a steering turn at the elevator at say 10,300 ft min. Perhaps at many contests, addressing a half dozen problematic areas in that way would be sufficient, any particular task might only involve one or two. Another at Truckee is returning through the Verdi gap from the north east. Again there are a few pilots I know that will come through there very low hoping for ridge lift, their backup plan is the lake at Boca. Not my cup of tea. A steering turn there would help, but it might still be practical (though foolhardy) to go through low, do a low save at Boca International, hit the steering turn at Verdi peak, and get home.