I'm not sure how we got from a discussion on the impact of FLARM stealth on soaring skills and leeching, on the one hand, and time-limited start gates on the other. My first reaction to the latter idea is that there are at least four negative effects, several of which have been noted:

1. Penalizes the pilot who needs a relight or has an equipment problem and has to land. In itself that's a disadvantage. Adding an explicit time/point penalty for starting late doesn't make sense. It's easy to cavalierly say that anyone who can't climb up and start within X amount of time has a different kind of problem, but at Elmira, we had one day with massive relights caused by cycling and OD, among them some of the highest-ranking U.S. pilots. Also at Elmira we saw a lot of starting through the top of the gate, which makes gaggle compression less of an issue. This reminds me of government regulators who try to "enhance" competition by imposing price controls. In this case, if starting late doesn't work, let "market forces" (i.e., the score sheet) take care of it.

2. Reduces the importance of yet another soaring skill: i.e., being able to assess and bracket the best weather of the day, including days when it makes sense to hold back until better weather arrives. Soaring isn't other sports. The fact that Formula One racing cars all start at the same moment is irrelevant to us. What's next, penalizing pilots who deviate from the course line more than X miles because it's "unfair" if everyone doesn't traverse the same terrain? Different sports, different competitive philosophies, different rules.

3. Compresses the field into a smaller slice of time and air, thus encouraging leeching and potentially impacting safety. You think it's crowded now at the top of the gaggle just under the start cylinder ceiling? Just wait until there's a bunch of pilots milling around watching the clock wanting to start just before the deadline...but not before anyone else does.

4. More complications to our scoring system. Winscore has become a chore to support already without these latest "innovations". Every time the rules change, the developer is forced to change the code. Anyone in the software business knows that each time you make a change, you risk introducing bugs, even with extensive regression and user acceptance testing (which, based on experience, isn't always done). Not too many years ago after a Regional contest raised some questions about the scores, I installed Winscore, poked through the documentation, and reran the scoring. No disrespect to the talented and dedicated developer but I was appalled at how difficult and manual some of the necessary operations were. No surprise; there's not much of a "market" for Winscore and the developer isn't getting rich supporting the tiny user group. I also found several bugs that changed the order of daily finishers. This was in late fall after that year's program had been in use all season. I'm not the only one who has encouraged the Rules Committee to factor in necessary changes to the scoring system whenever revisions to the rules are being considered. It's easy to say that starting penalties or thermal taxes can be done automatically. In the real world, that just isn't true.

The Elmira experiment provided evidence that stealth mode yields essentially all of the collision-warning benefits of FLARM without encouraging leeching or reducing the importance of the soaring skills we've always sought to evaluate.

Chip Bearden
ASW 24 "JB"
U.S.A.