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