The US Team selection process in future years

The system selection process could be improved by utilizing a hybrid system of objective (hard numbers from contests) with subjective (pilot votes). The current system used objective values to select those eligible but then used subjective voting to create the final list.

The forced choice ranking was subject to large variance and the absolute values were used to rank the pilots without looking to see if they were statistically significantly different. Rather than forced choice ranking a value of 0 to 10 could be given to each pilot during the voting. Remember all of these pilots were above 88 percent to make the list. Most should be getting an equavelnt score between 9 and 10 in voting.

The subjective ranking would also likely benefit from using the technique of throwing out the high and low score. This would minimize the impact of outliers and minimize one voter giving a pilot and extremely high or low ranking in an attempt to skew the results.


A hybrid system would use both values in a combined score to retain the objective score while adding the subjective component. The weighting of each can be adjusted, but I would recommend no less than 50% for the objective score.

Any plan as well as equations for adjusting scores from FAI scored contests should be put out for discussion and voted on by the racing community.