2019 SSA Contest Rules Pilot Opinion Poll Now Open

On Friday, October 25, 2019 at 1:56:21 PM UTC-4, John Cochrane wrote:
Lots of people stay out of racing because they perceive it to be dangerous, citing gaggles and midair risk; because they don't want to land out a lot; because they don't have or want to bring a crew.

Thanks, John.

I was researching a contest I flew back in 1980 (yeah, almost 40 years ago).. Many of the gliders are still competing as are a few of the pilots. Technology has changed--navigation was via map/compass and TP verification was by photo. Your choice of final glide calculators was cardboard or plastic.

The big difference: there were over 90 entries for 67 spots. So when I read about "big" contests here with 25 gliders per class, I just want to laugh out loud. Many of you have no idea (no offense to JJ, UH, KS, KM, SZ, and others who were around then).

What happened? As with Amelia Earhart, no one really knows, but class proliferation has gotta be one reason. That's competition classes, not--never mind. We had 3 classes then. Now there are 7 (excluding 1-26). Maybe more; we keep adding to the list.

The retirement of a generation of pilots who were military trained during WWII and got into soaring afterward probably contributed.

Costs have gone up, for sure. Median household income in 1980 was $18,684, about what we had in our LS-3 at the time. The same figure now is $68,000+. That's household income, not the cost of a new state-of-the-art sailplane. I guess I didn't have to explain that. It would be interesting to engage the IRS/FBI to investigate actual pilots from 1980 and 2019 to determine their household incomes. Maybe we can get Elizabeth Warren on that one if she's elected. But I suspect 1980 skewed somewhat more to the middle class than current rosters do. Soaring has never been cheap; it's just more expensive now.

And speaking of demand that declines with higher prices, I listened to the experts who predicted that mandating GPS data loggers would increase contest participation. Right. So I'm similarly cynical that participation declines from increasing landouts will be more than offset by a national upsurge in soaring popularity from one of our own winning the Worlds. We didn't see it the last 4 times an American was World Champion but, hey, this Internet thing means the old rules don't apply, and I'm not referring to competition rules.

The U.S. Rules (for competition) weren't simple then, but they're arguably more complex now, although I applaud the Rules Committee for their work to streamline them. I don't hear anyone saying that FAI Rules are simpler, however. So even if rules complexity were an aggravating factor in declining participation, it apparently wouldn't favor adopting FAI Rules.

In fact, I'd agree with John that if FAI Rules lead to more landouts and, by implication, fewer crewless pilots, then adopting them wholesale would hurt contest participation.

I suspect Tim Taylor and others are correct in saying that moving to FAI Rules would improve the chances of U.S. pilots making it onto the podium. But if that comes at the cost of even a handful of pilots dropping out of competition, that's too high a price, IMO, in an environment where more than one class is worried about having the minimum number of competitors show up for a Nationals. I've been crewless for most of the past 13 years. I've flown my class nationals (Standard) the past 5 years and landed out 3 times, 2 of those at airports for an aero retrieve. Being crewless may or may not affect the way I fly but for sure being able to do so affects whether I show up. The same is true for tasks that result in more landouts: e.g., ASTs, especially in uncertain weather. I actually like flying ASTs and knowing we're competing on the same course, but TATs and MATs definitely get us home more often than in the old days, and I'm not even talking about distance tasks (look it up).

One of my concerns is abdicating responsibility for rules governance to another organization. We have enough complaints now (mostly undeserved) about our own Rules Committee--and we can lobby those folks any time we want. With FAI Rules, how much further removed will be the IGC Plenary or whomever makes the decisions? Many think the U.S. Rules have been arguably better in certain ways over the years (I definitely like the flexibility the current start cylinder provides to tailor one's start to the conditions and course).. How much noise will we make when we can no longer control our own destiny, so to speak? Fast forward to 2022: "I'm tired of trying to work from within to make change in the IGC; it's time for the U.S. to go our own way!")

I know, I know, we can deal with these conflicts with local procedures. But isn't FAI Rules with enough local procedures to accommodate our preferences essentially the same as U.S. Rules that combine the best of FAI and U.S.?

Just for grins, how about two sets of rules at the same contest? I'm not sure it's still true but for a while we had two different standards for GPS flight recorders (Appendix B seems to have been omitted from the Rules in 2019). If you wanted to be considered for the U.S. Team, you needed a higher-standard flight recorder than did the masses (all 5 or 6 of them). So why not score the Nationals using FAI and US formulae and only the FAI scores count for U.S. Team selection? Or assign ASTs but allow 5 or 10 mile circles and score them both ways, with only the 500m circle flights counting for U.S. Team selection. Sure, that means you could win the Nationals but be excluded for Team selection (which could have happened with the flight recorder rule). But if changing the world order by pushing American pilots up the ranks is that important, so be it.

I'm confident the Rules Committee will do the right thing as long as they continue to pay attention to shrinking contest rolls and trying to address that.

Chip Bearden
JB

Very well spoken Chip

I should have added -- the perceived risk of landout damage is also significant in many people's reluctance to race. And it is a real factor. While I was keeping statistics, there was an event, usually a landout, with significant damage in about one out of every two contests.

Glider damage is less severe than people damage, and we are fortunate that the ratio of people damaged glide damage is so low. But any event with glider damage risks people damage, and people don't like to damage their gliders even if they personally are not at risk.

Needless to say, more long IGC style ASTs will mean more landouts, especially among the newer pilots. If you like gaggle racing, we really should keep the MAT with the option for "long MAT". It's just an AST with a time limit rather than a distance limit.

John Cochrane

Time. Men have given up autonomy over their time and children's time has been commercialized. Men are either holding their wife's purse at the mall or working to pay for the kid's sports camps or driving the kids to sports..
When sailplane racing was popular if dad was a sailplane pilot you grew up at the airport, if dad was a sailor you grew on the water, if dad liked model trains you grew up at train shows. Now kids grow up doing activities which suck money and time from the parents.
Until men reclaim control over their time many once robust activities will struggle.

On Monday, October 28, 2019 at 10:07:26 AM UTC-4, John Cochrane wrote:
Glider damage is less severe than people damage, and we are fortunate that the ratio of people damaged glide damage is so low.


Another good point, John. We talk about whether competition soaring is "risky", often in a general sense. But there are different types of risk. Start line/cylinder risk deserves its own discussion (e.g., high-speed plunges vs. gaggles milling around with the dive brakes open to remain below the top for 2 min.). And I'll refrain from re-opening the finish line vs. finish cylinder debate out of respect.

Landout risk is real. I've only incurred damage once landing off the airport but I bought a new landing gear on a sailplane that was just over a year old so I was kind of unhappy. Actually, AIG paid for the landing gear but the effect is similar long term. In any case, having landed out 100+ times over the years, I'm well aware of the risk of glider damage and prefer to avoid it these days if possible. We old timers talk pretty casually (as I am now) about all the crazy places we've landed but the advent of the airport landing bonus and higher task completion ratios has been good for the mainstream of our sport, I think.

But that's usually just money: deductibles, higher premiums for an individual, and higher rates for all. As you point out, the possibility of being injured in a landout is much lower but not zero. Wire strikes are always a threat and I know of at least one fatality and one very serious injury. The risk of stall/spin while going into a field is probably higher than when around the home airport but I don't have the data to prove it. When I clobbered the landing gear on my brand new ASW 24, Gerhard Waibel's wonderful design kept the wheel/tire jammed against the bottom of the fuselage when the trailing arms failed--as intended--in compression and that, in turn, kept the fuselage above the second rock, which would have punctured the belly much more deeply and possibly done damage to my spine. I've had several friends seriously injured in crashes involving landing out.

I do think the risk of injury is higher in gaggles than in landing out but, again, I have no data to prove it. Regardless, anything we do that increases gaggling risk AND landout risk without commensurate benefits seems ill advised.

I don't like most MAT tasks (e.g., one turn and go anywhere you want) but the CD used the "long" (a relative term) MAT at the Caesar Creek Nationals this summer to squeeze a day out of miserably weak weather so I'm on board in that situation. Fortunately (?), we only had 8 contestants in Standard Class and 9 in Sports Class so the gaggling risk was less than around some club operations. Hey, do the FAI Rules advocates realize that if higher landouts reduce the entry lists, that they'll get less practice in gaggle flying, thus negating any advantage of adopting the Rules in the first place? Kind of like confiscatory tax rates on the wealthy driving out well-to-do residents and their tax revenues. Or maybe I digress.

Chip Bearden
JB

On Monday, October 28, 2019 at 7:07:26 AM UTC-7, John Cochrane wrote:
I should have added -- the perceived risk of landout damage is also significant in many people's reluctance to race. And it is a real factor. While I was keeping statistics, there was an event, usually a landout, with significant damage in about one out of every two contests.

Glider damage is less severe than people damage, and we are fortunate that the ratio of people damaged glide damage is so low. But any event with glider damage risks people damage, and people don't like to damage their gliders even if they personally are not at risk.

Needless to say, more long IGC style ASTs will mean more landouts, especially among the newer pilots. If you like gaggle racing, we really should keep the MAT with the option for "long MAT". It's just an AST with a time limit rather than a distance limit.

John Cochrane

You sound pretty negative to this common SCUM, John!
Jim

Calling a MAT is the easy way out for some inexperienced CD’s, perhaps some recommendations/rules could be imposed. Outlaw calling a no turn MAT, first turn should be a minimum of say 15s/m. At least this would get everybody started in the same direction! I have flown a first turn that was only 6 miles out which was meaningless! Perhaps a limit on the number of 1 turn MAT’s that can be called in a contest. No restriction on MAT’s with 2 or more turns. The MAT was designed to call numerous turn-points, but I can’t remember flying but one of these!
Just some recommendation,
JJ

On Monday, October 28, 2019 at 4:04:56 PM UTC-4, wrote:
Calling a MAT is the easy way out for some inexperienced CD’s, perhaps some recommendations/rules could be imposed. Outlaw calling a no turn MAT, first turn should be a minimum of say 15s/m. At least this would get everybody started in the same direction! I have flown a first turn that was only 6 miles out which was meaningless! Perhaps a limit on the number of 1 turn MAT’s that can be called in a contest. No restriction on MAT’s with 2 or more turns. The MAT was designed to call numerous turn-points, but I can’t remember flying but one of these!
Just some recommendation,
JJ

I've called and flown lots of MAT's. I've never called a no turn. Most have been more than one, usually 2 or 3.
The MAT was created to provide a task that challenges the experts, yet lets the slow pilots/gliders come home with speed points.
Ideally, the more sure the task caller is of the weather, the more turns and longer the assigned portion of the task can be. This keeps everybody on the same course in the same weather.
Calling a no turn is a matter of desperation, only to be used to get a day at the end of a contest that might otherwise not have enough days, in my opinion.
FWIW
UH

I really don't like MATs. Even with an initial turnpoint and a steering turnpoint at the end of the task, it entails a bunch of heads down time. It is the only task where I have to look at the sky, determine where to fly, look down at my paper map (hopefully available easily and folded properly) and then look down to re-program my flight computer.

The Long MAT reduces the head down time significantly but it's still more than a TAT with big circles (which is the option on a weather variable day).

As always, YMMV.

Lou

On Sunday, October 27, 2019 at 11:55:32 AM UTC-6, wrote:
On Friday, October 25, 2019 at 1:56:21 PM UTC-4, John Cochrane wrote:
Lots of people stay out of racing because they perceive it to be dangerous, citing gaggles and midair risk; because they don't want to land out a lot; because they don't have or want to bring a crew.

Thanks, John.

I was researching a contest I flew back in 1980 (yeah, almost 40 years ago). Many of the gliders are still competing as are a few of the pilots. Technology has changed--navigation was via map/compass and TP verification was by photo. Your choice of final glide calculators was cardboard or plastic.

The big difference: there were over 90 entries for 67 spots. So when I read about "big" contests here with 25 gliders per class, I just want to laugh out loud. Many of you have no idea (no offense to JJ, UH, KS, KM, SZ, and others who were around then).

What happened? As with Amelia Earhart, no one really knows, but class proliferation has gotta be one reason. That's competition classes, not--never mind. We had 3 classes then. Now there are 7 (excluding 1-26). Maybe more; we keep adding to the list.

The retirement of a generation of pilots who were military trained during WWII and got into soaring afterward probably contributed.

Costs have gone up, for sure. Median household income in 1980 was $18,684, about what we had in our LS-3 at the time. The same figure now is $68,000+. That's household income, not the cost of a new state-of-the-art sailplane. I guess I didn't have to explain that. It would be interesting to engage the IRS/FBI to investigate actual pilots from 1980 and 2019 to determine their household incomes. Maybe we can get Elizabeth Warren on that one if she's elected. But I suspect 1980 skewed somewhat more to the middle class than current rosters do. Soaring has never been cheap; it's just more expensive now.

And speaking of demand that declines with higher prices, I listened to the experts who predicted that mandating GPS data loggers would increase contest participation. Right. So I'm similarly cynical that participation declines from increasing landouts will be more than offset by a national upsurge in soaring popularity from one of our own winning the Worlds. We didn't see it the last 4 times an American was World Champion but, hey, this Internet thing means the old rules don't apply, and I'm not referring to competition rules.

The U.S. Rules (for competition) weren't simple then, but they're arguably more complex now, although I applaud the Rules Committee for their work to streamline them. I don't hear anyone saying that FAI Rules are simpler, however. So even if rules complexity were an aggravating factor in declining participation, it apparently wouldn't favor adopting FAI Rules.

In fact, I'd agree with John that if FAI Rules lead to more landouts and, by implication, fewer crewless pilots, then adopting them wholesale would hurt contest participation.

I suspect Tim Taylor and others are correct in saying that moving to FAI Rules would improve the chances of U.S. pilots making it onto the podium. But if that comes at the cost of even a handful of pilots dropping out of competition, that's too high a price, IMO, in an environment where more than one class is worried about having the minimum number of competitors show up for a Nationals. I've been crewless for most of the past 13 years. I've flown my class nationals (Standard) the past 5 years and landed out 3 times, 2 of those at airports for an aero retrieve. Being crewless may or may not affect the way I fly but for sure being able to do so affects whether I show up. The same is true for tasks that result in more landouts: e.g., ASTs, especially in uncertain weather. I actually like flying ASTs and knowing we're competing on the same course, but TATs and MATs definitely get us home more often than in the old days, and I'm not even talking about distance tasks (look it up).

One of my concerns is abdicating responsibility for rules governance to another organization. We have enough complaints now (mostly undeserved) about our own Rules Committee--and we can lobby those folks any time we want. With FAI Rules, how much further removed will be the IGC Plenary or whomever makes the decisions? Many think the U.S. Rules have been arguably better in certain ways over the years (I definitely like the flexibility the current start cylinder provides to tailor one's start to the conditions and course). How much noise will we make when we can no longer control our own destiny, so to speak? Fast forward to 2022: "I'm tired of trying to work from within to make change in the IGC; it's time for the U.S. to go our own way!")

I know, I know, we can deal with these conflicts with local procedures. But isn't FAI Rules with enough local procedures to accommodate our preferences essentially the same as U.S. Rules that combine the best of FAI and U.S..?

Just for grins, how about two sets of rules at the same contest? I'm not sure it's still true but for a while we had two different standards for GPS flight recorders (Appendix B seems to have been omitted from the Rules in 2019). If you wanted to be considered for the U.S. Team, you needed a higher-standard flight recorder than did the masses (all 5 or 6 of them). So why not score the Nationals using FAI and US formulae and only the FAI scores count for U.S. Team selection? Or assign ASTs but allow 5 or 10 mile circles and score them both ways, with only the 500m circle flights counting for U.S. Team selection. Sure, that means you could win the Nationals but be excluded for Team selection (which could have happened with the flight recorder rule). But if changing the world order by pushing American pilots up the ranks is that important, so be it.

I'm confident the Rules Committee will do the right thing as long as they continue to pay attention to shrinking contest rolls and trying to address that.

Chip Bearden
JB

With regard to pilot participation, I think that at best the rules would have a minor effect on this. There is a far bigger and more complex problem here, that affects not just soaring, but general aviation in general, and that is the declining numbers and aging out of pilots. And it's not simply just because "flying has become so expensive". I think it has more to do with less young people having an interest in aviation to start with. They are more interested in saying at home and playing video games, than building a model airplane. When I grew up I had a passion for aviation. I'd read books on the subject. My first toy was a model of a 747. I built RC gliders, even designing and flying my own model, from the ground up. When I talk to others around me at work or in my other social circles, there is very little interest in aviation. I find this a bit strange. And I feel the solution to our problem of dwindling numbers at contests has more to do with increasing interest in aviation, and improving access to flying, than it does with worrying about rules. Granted, rules can have an effect on how elite pilots train for and think about flying specific tasks, and this can have an effect on how they perform at the international level, but if we don't do more to improve participation in the sport at its base, discussing differences in rules won't matter. The more people involved in soaring, the more will start flying contests.