The Brazillians use a weather based handicapping system for their nationals
(not enough gliders in any class to have a class based championship?) You
might want to look into it before inventing something from scratch.

Perhaps a Brazillian could post to tell us a bit about it?

regards,

dave r.



"Andy Blackburn" wrote in message
...
At 14:18 17 August 2005, Bill Daniels wrote:

I was thinking of a real contest where the flying was
restricted to a task
area and the pilots were likely to be fairly good at
thermalling. To help
get a more accurate picture of the day, the lower 25%
of the contestants
could be discarded.

If the upper 25% of the pilots got 5 knots +or- 1knot
at the best hour of
the day, that would seem to be a pretty good indication
of the best the day
had to offer.

Oh, I thought you were suggesting a system for OLC
purposes - where the sample size would probably be
too small on average to be generally useful.

In a 'real' contest situation you might get enough
numbers to get usable results. I've talked about this
with members of the competition committee because I
think the idea has merit, at least in theory. Most
think it's too complicated and that we get enough complaints
about 'unfair' handicaps as it is. Honestly, I think
it would be hard to come up with a McCready adjustment
for every glider - particularly since most achieved
cross-country speeds far exceed the theoretical McCready
speed so it's not reasonable to base an adjustment
on McCready theory alone. In my experience the thing
that really spreads out the pack in sports class is
actually the ratio of interthermal distance to height
of the lift band. Wind speed in the boundary layer
also matters a lot. The guys flying the little gliders
at Parowan this year made heroic, but very low scoring
flights on the windy days.

If someone could come up with a reliable algorithm
for calculating the 'day strength slope' in the handicap
for all gliders I'd be very impressed.

9B