Forget Dying; Is Soaring Dead?

Chip I think you meant to ask "Is Contest flying dead " .

Not if some effort is put into promoting contests and making them
interesting, inexpensive and especially for the younger folks new to
contest flying, easy to participate in .

At our club, Central Indiana Soaring we have established a "Club
Contest" that can take place every x/c flying day of the year at our
field . So far this season we have had 6 contest days and 10 pilots
have participated ( out of a total club membership of around 65 ) .
There is no cost to members, there are 2 classes ( Advanced and
Beginners ) and the rules are simple . The idea was not entirely ours ,
in fact we copied a lot of the rules from the Chicago Glider Club's
successful contest system. You do need a "sparkplug" type to do the
scoring and e-mail out the results after each contest day - We have DT
who does a great job there .

The contest makes for a lot of extra enjoyment and discussion between
the members, certainly improves x/c flying skills and I firmly believe
will lead to more participation at Regional contests in the future.

To attract more pilots to Regional and National contests they need to
be motivated to spend the time and money to do that successfully -
Local Club contests that become interesting to new pilots stimulate
that motivation.

My 2 cents worth .

Ron (ZA).

wrote:
Chip I think you meant to ask "Is Contest flying dead " .

Not if some effort is put into promoting contests and making them
interesting, inexpensive and especially for the younger folks new to
contest flying, easy to participate in .


My 2 cents worth .

Ron (ZA).

I agree. I've been running the Governor's Cup in Region II for (gasp)
10 years as of this season. In each of the last 5 years we've had
anywhere from 25 to 45 participants, about the same as a well-attended
regional. It's a middle ground between a regional (everyone at the
same airport flying the same task) and the OLC (nobody at the same
airport flying anywhere). The former has its drawbacks in terms of
cost, logistics, etc. while the latter is not really a competition in
the sense that you can't compare a flight in the California mountains
with a flight in eastern Ohio.

Competitions like the Governor's Cup which require folks to fly in the
same general area on a racing task give you a chance to get some sense
of how you stack up against other pilots in a (reasonably) realistic
racing setting. By picking a task area that includes several
gliderports, it's possible to create either assigned tasks, MATS, or
AATs which are fair to everyone. Looking at a map, I can see many
places in the world where this is possible - the UK and Germany just
for instance; any place that has a reasonable density of gliding sites
will work. All it takes is a few clubs to get together and set up
standard tasks that can be accessed from each of the respective
airfields.

So, it may be that the fully centralized contest appeals to a limited
number of people, while the completely decentralized contest may not be
"racing" in the traditional sense. But, there is certainly a middle
ground that deserves to be further explored and promoted.

http://home.netcom.com/~pappa3/

Erik Mann
LS8-18 (P3)

I agree with Erik: the Governor's Cup and similar competitions are a
middle ground between traditional centralized (i.e., one location)
contests and the OLC. In one sense, they're the best of both worlds:
more pilots fly the course on any given day precisely because they
don't have to meet in some common location but can launch from their
own gliderports. Yet, though the courses are assigned area tasks with a
wide range of distances, everyone flies in roughly the same geography,
unlike the OLC.

It's the next best thing to the head-to-head competition many of us
enjoy at the regional and national level. And it's excellent practice
for those, getting us out on course in the kind of less-than-perfect
weather in which contests are often won or lost, albeit at the price of
the occasional landout (although, since most of the G Cup turnpoints
are active glider operations offering a tow, falling down part way
around is sometimes no more traumatic--ignoring the scoring
implications--than pulling into a gas station to fill up the family
car).

But given the title of my original posting, I'll close by noting that
Governor's Cup participation this year looks to be down at least 25%
from last year in number of pilots (from nearly 50 in 2005 to the low
30s this year). Issues cited by others such as increasing numbers of
contests vying for the same fixed number of pilots and the long
distances and vacation time demanded by, say, a nationals on the other
side of the country don't seem to apply here. Soaring, or at least
competitive soaring--would anyone have responded to my posting if I'd
more narrowly defined my subject? --does seem to be in rapid
decline.

Chip Bearden
ASW 24 "JB"