2019 SSA Contest Rules Pilot Opinion Poll Now Open

On Tuesday, October 29, 2019 at 10:15:10 AM UTC-6, Alex Okeefe wrote:
Watching this from the UK and finding it ever so entertaining -
thanks all.

I've somehow managed to survive all of my competition years so far
without meeting an untimely end. That includes a good number of
landouts in the early years which, would you believe with decent
training and without an unfounded and inflated percetion of risk
were carried out incident free.

I do especially enjoy that we can race on a level playing field,
without having to create scoring formulae and task formats to make
slower pilots feel like they've done better than they have. A sad
consequence of this is that the slower pilots, who score much lower
and land out more often are especially driven to improve and
become quite formidable competition. What a bother.

I know you're all fans of winscore (I had to look it up). If anyone
would like to change to Seeyou then just ask myself or one of the
many people around the world who are familiar with it to show you.
I'm afraid this could take up to 10 minutes.

Carry on!

At 15:51 19 October 2019, John Godfrey QT wrote:
On Wednesday, October 2, 2019 at 7:40:59 PM UTC-4, Andy
Blackburn wrote:
US contest pilots.

The 2019 SSA Contest Rules Pilot Opinion Poll is now open and
will remain
open through October 20, 2019. You must be on the SSA Pilot
Ranking List to
participate. We look forward to your input.

You can access the poll online at:
http://www.adamsfive.com/a5soaring/survey/surveys.php

Rich Owen is running unopposed for re-election to the Rules
Committee.
Consequently, Rich will return to his RC seat for a four-year term.
Congratulations Rich!

For the SSA Contest Rules Committee
Andy Blackburn, Chair
9B

Just a reminder here. In spite of the missives being written
highlighting
the "incredible downsides" of a "big switch" approach to adoption
of FAI
rules, that IS NOT WHAT IS ON THE TABLE.

What is on the table (via the poll) is: SHOULD THE 2020 FAI
CLASS NATIONALS
BE TASKED AND SCORED ACCORDING TO FAI SC3A TASK
DEFINITIONS AND SCORING
FORMULAE AND THE RESULT EVALUATED.


I am personally a bit confounded and disappointed at the
resistance to this
experiment by the introduction of all the "big switch - death panel"
arguments, which are at best peripheral to the immediate decision.

Record your opinion please.

QT


I can't speak for everyone in the US, but I feel it is safe to say that real practical training for land-outs, at least in the US is very poor. We read about the theory of it, and get verbal instruction from our instructors on it. But it would be very seldom that it is actually done on purpose. I believe this is largely due to the type of training gliders most people fly here in the US--the SGS 2-33. It is a real bear to take apart and trailer back to the gliderport after a land-out, and would likely take a large crew of people working on it for a large part of the day to accomplish this. As such, folks around here--at least where I trained in WA, are very apprehensive about land-outs, and at least with the newer generation of pilots, very inexperienced in it. Of course, there are individual exceptions to this, but I think it is a safe generalization to make.

On Tue, 29 Oct 2019 12:10:49 -0700, John Foster wrote:

I can't speak for everyone in the US, but I feel it is safe to say that
real practical training for land-outs, at least in the US is very poor.
We read about the theory of it, and get verbal instruction from our
instructors on it. But it would be very seldom that it is actually done
on purpose. I believe this is largely due to the type of training
gliders most people fly here in the US--the SGS 2-33. It is a real bear
to take apart and trailer back to the gliderport after a land-out, and
would likely take a large crew of people working on it for a large part
of the day to accomplish this. As such, folks around here--at least
where I trained in WA, are very apprehensive about land-outs, and at
least with the newer generation of pilots, very inexperienced in it. Of
course, there are individual exceptions to this, but I think it is a
safe generalization to make.

In the UK the necessary training for XC flying (Navigation, Field
selection and Field Landing) tends to be done in Touring Motor Gliders,
e.g Grob G109 or Scheibe SF-25.

My club uses an SF-25 for this. With a bit of power on the SF-25
approximates an ASK-21 well enough for this exercise, so a field can be
selected and the circuit and landing approach flown, with power going on
again when either its obvious its going wrong (so try again) or its clear
the landing would be good and in a well-chosen field. None of these three
are pass/fail exercises - its normal to do them until both instructor and
student are happy.

However, I realise that this may not work for smaller US clubs - no
rentable SF-25s or G-109s in the locality would be a show stopper, along
with, quite possibly, no TMG-current instructors.

FWIW in my club its normal for a new solo pilot to fly SZD Juniors until
they have their Bronze badge, and often Silver height and duration as
well, since all these can be done with local soaring. Then they go for
Silver distance on the next suitable day after getting signed-off for
their exercises in the SF-25. I did Bronze and Silver in a Junior off the
winch and only then got my aero-tow sign-off and converted onto the
club's Pegase 90 and Discus As.


--
Martin | martin at
Gregorie | gregorie dot org