Contest Class Development for Future Success - The Case fordeveloping the Handicapped Classes

Glad to have a junior voice chime in.

There is a proposal the RC is working to eliminate all the graduated penalties, devaluation formulas, motorglider accommodations, etc. many of those were added over the years to address real or perceived fairness issues. A clean slate is one thing worth considering - though personally I think rules complexity is a bit of a red herring. The real issue is cost and time.

How is a time-limited OLC race with a start gate different from a no-turn MAT? Maybe freeing people up from the need to go to turnpoints helps? I find the OLC leg valuation rules to be unnecessarily Byzantine. Why not make every leg equal value and have no limit on the number of legs? Daniel made mincemeat out of the field on a MAT day at Montague by turning it into a lap race using basically one thermal all day long - pretty cool.

On consequence of simplification is more instances of what happened at Moriarty this year where one bold pilot essentially won the contest on the first day by making distance on a day that no one else did. That was under the current rules that have all the complexities of number of competitors devaluation, etc. Are people okay with that?

Daniel -

Great stuff! I agree with almost all of your points, including some of the attitudes from _some_ senior members of the community as "youngin" (I started at age 28). Ironically, the most attitude I received was from local club pilots/members... The folks in the contest scene have been far more supportive, in my experience. In terms of more getting people into the sport, I think you're echoing sentiments that Chris and I agree with: The sport isn't cheap, and the club environment doesn't promote rapid training or a strong push from solo through becoming an accomplished XC pilot. However, these topics are tangential to the contest scene itself.

Regarding your thoughts on changes to contest formats: I agree with almost all of your ideas, excepting the promotion of AT/ASTs over TATs. I think TATs are misused; but AT/ASTs have some big problems that most people don't think about or realize (I've been noodling on a SOARING article for 2 years about this topic). I also think that MATs can be used to emulate something like the "OLC tasks" you are discussing - again the problem may lie with the way MATs are being called.

BTW, Chris and I both had a chat this morning on the phone about ways to call "distance-type" tasks that reward pilots for making it back to the home airport... Glad to see others are thinking along the same lines and that some other scoring models already exist for this!

Also, rules-simplification is a good goal. I think a lot of the rules we have were invented to cover corner-cases and niche situations... There's an argument to having the rules there; but it _does_ contribute to the perception that the rules are overly-complicated or hard to learn. If people stick to the fundamentals of the rules, its actually quite simple - but that's not the perception non-contest people seem to have. Personally, I know that some Regionals I've been to flat-out ignore some rules or at least treat them as an honor-system, in order to keep it all simple and easy-to-manage. And if that's the way we're going to run contests and fly them, then maybe we should consider eliminating some rules - at *least* down at the Regional level. Get more folks hooked on contests in general, and then reserve the more-complicated rules for Nationals since its a higher-stakes game... You're never going to have as many folks at Nationals as you have at Regionals.

Looking forward to meeting you (hopefully at a contest) some day!

--Noel

Interesting stuff Daniel. Well said.

On Wednesday, July 16, 2014 11:40:36 AM UTC-4, wrote:
I mostly agree with Chris Young. It seems to me that most of the solutions do not address the elephant in the room, which is there is no replacement population in the sport of soaring. Moving the nationals closer, making some classes handicapped, gently adjusting tasking one way or the other could generate some minimal effects, but it does not stop the fact that if this continues, soaring as a competitive sport will no longer exist once most of the people on this thread will no longer be able to fly.



As far as I have observed in my own progression in soaring, those around me and the juniors that I have been in close contact with, it seems to me that there are two major issues that beset the soaring scene in the USA today.



1) Most of the population is simply unaware of what soaring is. We need to get the message of soaring across through various means in order to attract new membership, plain and simple. This will not be focused on this thread...



2) Once a potential pilot does get hooked enough to get their license, their ability to progress in the sport, unless they are financially well equipped is very difficult. After getting rated, most pilots will fly in a club.. Many clubs, especially when it comes to juniors are not very inclined to allow their equipment to be used over prolonged flights, such as the five hour, let alone cross country. The social scene is not very conducive either.. A sizeable enough of a contingent of the older folk thinks it is unreasonable and unfair that the juniors "have it easy" or are doing things differently than they had. In general, it is not easy for new people to enter into this sort of cliquish environment with a lot of existing politics. Furthermore, for juniors, when the next youngest person is 45 years old, the interactions are already highly demanding and it doesn't help when you have people hostile to their presence in the first place.



Aside from the club environment, simply bridging the gap between private pilot and cross country is a very difficult one, even if all the prerequisites line up. We fly in a very mentally demanding sport that is very hard. This period in a pilot's soaring career is one that is least rewarding and most demanding. It is necessary to significantly assist and motivate new pilots going through this period.



Once a pilot starts flying cross country, they might start getting interested in the prospect of flying contests. However, on the outset, they see a bloated set of rules, complicated tasks, and a huge amount of commitment in time and money to participate in this. Frankly, the vast majority prefer OLC because of this. Nephi is an excellent example! They were fully booked for the Nephi OLC event, but the regional to be done in August, which has a relatively very large number of pilots signed up, is significantly less than the OLC event! Contests are becoming too difficult and too burdensome to justify the event for many people.



One possible solution and one that would minimize an obstacle to racing is to greatly simplify the format. I think it would be beneficial to get rid of the TAT and the MAT, and have two racing formats: Assigned Task and an OLC style distance task, with some additions to make it work for a grid and a become more of a race. There are several reasons



1) If you get rid of the MAT/TAT, you greatly simplify the rules and the concept of racing. If you have a pure distance task, it is simple: You go as far as you can within the OLC format and come home. This is something that pilots can easily learn at their home field and something that easily registers for even a layman.



2) We keep the AST for pure racing tasks as they are also very simple and easy to practice. I would advise that the task would potentially target a shorter time for the winner, such as two hours on what would be a three hour TAT task, with a reasonable opportunity for the rest of the finishers to file in between 2-3:30 hours.



3) This seems to me to be a better compromise for the different kinds of flying that most of do already, rather than the TAT/MAT. We have distance pilots and racing pilots.



The contest admin and the pilots flying in such a meet have a lot of discretion over how they would like to task such a contest. It could be entirely one kind of task or the other. They could save the ASTs for the stronger days for better "pure" racing or they could instead use the OLC tasks on those days so that pilots can really stretch out far.



For some specific ways that the race would be executed:



1) I would keep the starts/finishes with a five mile and a 1 mile sector with a minimum finish altitude.



2) The OLC tasks would also have a start and a finish, with a LST style start, with a standard 30 minute start window. This way everyone has a fair chance to start and embark on their distance journey.



3) Unless someone has a better idea, we would keep the 1000 point system. For OLC tasks, it would be good to have a major bonus for coming back to the finish. I would have a say scoring formula that basically takes the winner's handicapped distance plus 250 points as the basis for the rest of the scoring.



4) I would eliminate devaluations. Every day is a 1000 point day. The 1-26ers use a very nice scoring formula: the speed of the slowest finisher determines the distance points for the day. This is to reward he who comes back, no matter how slow. I think this would work well with the proposed format and would simplify understanding the scoring significantly.



5) I would eliminate any leeway in the scoring formula. While it seems nice that busting the minimum finish by 50 ft still garners a score, all of those policies are very complicated to understand for any entering the racing scene. At this point, loggers display altitudes. Even the ancient Colibri does this. No one says that you have to turn a turnpoint at exactly one mile or come in exactly at minimum finish, or exit the start sector at exactly 2 minutes or the like. Pilots should build in their own margins, rather than the scoring formula.



6) The only potential problem I could see in the execution of an OLC style distance day is that it would inherently reward flying very large durations. I think that this is actually okay, but if it is considered a problem, that could be fixed by having a maximum time. The way this would work is you go as far as you can in a given time span, and then your distance ends there and you get your 250 point bonus if you get back to the airport. I don't like adding a maximum time for it complicates the scoring process and the task, though it is a solution if this is considered a problem.



7) This format works for both limited handicapped racing and pure classes.. The format as is now is not conducive for low performance anyway with so much weight being put on speed points, rendering them uncompetitive.



Some of my humble thoughts,

Daniel Sazhin