US Competition Pilot Poll and Election

On Friday, October 7, 2016 at 1:18:07 PM UTC-4, Bruce Hoult wrote:
On Saturday, October 8, 2016 at 5:30:10 AM UTC+13, Tango Eight wrote:
Sean:

Adopting FAI rules might be the final nail for the sport in the US. Club doesn't replace Sports, so you lose participation there. There's no way to combine standards with 15m under FAI rules, so now the standard class is completely dead and gone for good. Guys with old ships racing in the handicapped "combined FAI class" (can't we just call it 15m, pretty please?) will be less inclined to race with 27s and V2s and come to think of it, ASW-20Bs and Cs, Ventus As and Bs and LS-6s don't fit *anywhere* in the FAI rules scheme of things, so those guys are either racing at parity with 27s (aggravating!) or just SOL.

What this means is that your average regional race will now consist of 18m, a much smaller 15m class and a Club Class that might be 2/3 the size of the Sports class is replaces.

You need to get your head out of your 18m cockpit and think about the less well heeled trying to participate in the other classes. You need us. Without us, your races either get a lot more expensive and a lot less interesting socially or people just give up altogether.

It's pretty distressing seeing only 20 guys at a race that used to regularly host twice that number (New Castle). Incidentally, 8 of the 13 gliders racing in 15m were either standards or old 15m ships. I'm really pleased that BRSS was willing to work their tails off to host only 20 of us. Is it reasonable to expect that they'll do it for 12?

I'd like to take the opportunity here to thank the RC for creating the std + 15m combined class, because the racing in that class has been a great deal of fun.

I may be mistaken here, but I feel as if you're talking about what classes events are held for, while Sean is talking about questions such as task types and scoring formulas. And they are totally independent things!

Sure, if you want to enter the Worlds then you'll have to choose some current FAI class to enter in.

And learn the FAI contest rules instead of the US contest rules, and how to best makes use of them to your advantage.

One is about what piece of plastic you sit in. The other is about what is inside your head.

Even if you adopt FAI tasking and scoring, there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to prevent you from running a contest with whatever class entry rules you want to. Have a 1-26 class if there are a lot of them near you. Have a PW5+AC4+Ka6 class if that's what people have. Or make an event for gliders with a BGA handicap (sorry -- is there a US equivalent?) between 88 (LS1, DG100) and 96 (Cirrus 18.8, Janus A/B, DG300, Speed Astir, DG1000 18, PIK 20, LS4) if you've got a lot of people with gliders like that. Or whatever.

Who stops you? No one.

Running an event with some wacky special class or classes that fits your available entrants is pretty much a zero marginal cost thing to do.

And you can use FAI tasking and scoring for it. Which puts a lower cognitive load on pilots, who only have to learn one set of rules, and removes the need to maintain and debate local tasking and scoring rules.

(and of course IGC handicaps instead of BGA ones if you want .. I just wanted to emphasise that you don't have to go IGC for everything)

Or have I misrepresented Sean?

Hi Bruce,

Those are interesting points, thanks.

I don't understand the motivation here myself. The idea that switching to FAI rules saves work for anyone is obviously mistaken. None of this stuff happens by itself, it all takes work. The US RC does it's work very publicly compared to the IGC, so there's this (mistaken) impression that it's a bigger deal. It isn't. Ask our IGC rep about that.

Probably, the motivation has more to do with tasking. I have a couple of things to say about that (directed at this topic, not to Bruce).

There is huge tasking variety available under both rule sets and to the extent that anyone wants to *task* more like a European contest, that is already fairly achievable under US rules (scoring philosophy is different, but the same winners will win with high probability).

My view: AT's suck. You can have it one way, or the other (at the regional level): you can task something honestly challenging for the winners and land out 1/3 of the fleet (or more with one good t-storm), or you can assign something that gets almost everyone around and live with the fact that there's going to be about 15 points separating the top three places. The only places AT's don't suck are a) racing venues with uniformly excellent weather and uniformly excellent pilots, b) nationals venues where the not so excellent pilots are fully aware of what they have signed up for and likewise prepared mentally and otherwise to deal with a contest that is really hard as opposed to really fun and c) in internet bulletin board lala land where armchair tough guys can blow all their hot air in whatever degree of anonymity they choose.

You can design an AAT to keep the fleet closer together by using many turns with small radii rather than a few big open circles. But that has a truly odious downside. You end up with short task legs and you don't really go anywhere. The only thing less like XC soaring would be doing laps around a 50K triangle. That might be "racing", but it isn't anything I care about enough to hitch up the trailer and drive 13 hours to do. So when I get input, it's for longer legs... and to the extent that one needs to accommodate uncertainty in weather or variability in pilot & sailplane performance that means larger circles.

Sean had his giggle with the GP this Summer. I hear it was a good time. Well done. Short tasks over flat land in questionable weather at a venue famous for questionable weather isn't something *I* am going to drive halfway across the country to do, but if it lights someone else's candle, that's fine, I support that, I *applaud* that. But on the flip side, I'm going to get my back up when someone tries to dictate to others that "they need to task more ATs" in places that are famous for difficult terrain with big error bars on weather (the places I *will* drive halfway across the country to fly). That approach (challenging ATs), much used in the pre-GPS past, used to break a lot of gliders and broken gliders are absolutely no fun at all.

non-anonymously yours,
Evan Ludeman / T8