On Sep 24, 9:47*pm, Tuno wrote:
Noel,

All of the four regional contests I've attended had the same schedule
-- practice day on a Sunday followed by six contest days. This allowed
travel days on the sandwiching Saturday and Sunday.

I've always thought it was an ideal schedule. A tremendous amount of
work goes into assembling the staff and towplanes that make it happen,
and doing that for anything less than 5 or 6 contest days just doesn't
make sense.

I'm fortunate to live in Arizona where for years we've had the Arizona
Soaring Association's contest series, which covers a number of
weekends throughout the soaring season, at several locations around
Arizona. The club at El Tiro recently started their own similar
series. If your area doesn't have something similar, I highly
encourage you to talk to other pilots about organizing one. All it
takes is a little leadership and a few pilots who want to do a little
organized contest flying.

I'm happy to share the Excel spreadsheet we use for collating the ASA
series scores with any other club that's interested.

-ted
ASG28½ "2NO"

In my experience contests fall into two broad categories (personally I
quite like them both).

1) Concentrated flying contests. These typically are sanctioned
events. They tend to have broader "cachement areas" and therefore
larger fields of competitors. Because of this the ratio of flying time
to driving time matters as does the need to bridge across patches of
bad weather. UH described the primary logic - maximize the number of
contest days that fit in a week of vacation (typically Su-Sa plus a
practice day).

2) Distributed flying contests. These typically have 10-20 flying days
spread over a season's worth of weekends - though there are other
formats. The idea here is to eliminate the need for vacation days. The
cachement area is more or less the same as for weekend flying since
the ratio of driving to flying can get quite high if you are coming
from any distance. The trick here is that it's pretty hard for
contestants to commit to 5-10 weekends 3-6 months in advance so
generally you only count a competitors best 6 out of 10 days, 12 out
of 20 days, etc. This gives some advantage to the pilots who can
commit to more days but people live with that fact without complaining
(usually). I'm sure there are other formats that address the need to
drop some days. I've flown the ASA series off and on since the
mid-80s and I have to say it is a great way to get new racing pilots
into the game - there is even a "B class" that is explicitly for
newbies. It's also a great way to nurture a racing fraternity within a
broader soaring community.

A variation is the "short format" distributed flying event. The ASA
Southwest Soaring Championship comes to mind. I've seen this most
frequently as two consecutive weekends where one is a three day
weekend. Again the idea is to require zero vacation time so as to
maximize local participation and maybe bring in a pilot or two from
slightly further away. ASA also holds this event as part of the season
long series with separate scoring. This format is a good way to try to
ignite local contest flying that is a step beyond OLC in terms of head-
to-head racing, but is not quite as much work and commitment as the
season-long format.

9B