Interesting post Chris. I respect your making a clear and direct statement on what you are looking for in the sport of soaring. I also respect the call for radical change rather than small moves. That said, I am going to have to respectfully disagree with some aspects of OLC being a solution to improve competitive soaring participation.

Your stated personal requirement for a "satisfying flying experience" is very interesting. In my view, that represents very different things to different people. Not everyone believes that absolute maximization of the soaring day is objectively possible or a means for objective sailplane racing competition.

OLC, in my opinion, is not an objective form of performance measurement. It is worthless in terms of comparing flights from two different locations or from the same location leaving an hour apart for that matter. But OLC is simple and devoid of any rules at all really! This serves a purpose although not a very strong one in my view.

To me, OLC is not satisfying because the concept of a race or race track for that matter is nonexistent. Comparing a flight from Ionia, MI to a flight in Mifflin is pointless. Sailplane racing (if you can call OLC that) without the concept of a starting point (or time) is a different game entirely.. Starting 30 minutes or an hour earlier than another competitor is a tremendous advantage in this form of outright distance competition. In my view a race without some form of starting rule is in fact not a race at all. It's more analogous to going hiking with a sunset limitation and calling it a "race." I hiked 20 miles and started at 10am, you hiked 15 but started at 12 noon. So what? What does that mean really? And furthermore in OLC, you can hike entirely different trails. So what would these "results" mean to us again?

OLC represents, at best, a very crude means of measuring pilots trying to fly as far as they can on a given day. But not everyone wants to risk flying as absolutely far as the day allows. If this was truly a competition, OLC distance based competitions would result in far more landouts like the old days on their distance tasks!

You mention pilot elected start times as part of OLC? I don't think so! Imagine a successful OLC contest with 40 gliders. That would be one hour (at least) between the first and last launch. Each competitive OLC pilot would be starting as soon as they climbed in their first thermal. So launching early is an advantage and tail enders would likely push the tow aircraft to start towing the early guys before trigger to dilute their advantage! :-) At least contest gliders are starting from the same start cylinder and have A CHOICE of when to start! For example, at 2014 18 meter nationals, the winner Doug Jacobs started alone and early almost every single contest day. Start gate roulette can also be fixed by narrowing the starting range (yes, I know, another rule modification, but tough ;-), contest soaring is still a competitive sport!)

On a given OLC contest day, let's say one OLC pilot guesses that North is going to be better, another guesses south. Now let's say the south guy ended up 20% farther than the north. So what? Great, you picked a better quadrant. Good for you! In OLC a big aspect of the results would come down to weather guessing. Is that far less a test of flying skill vs. other pilots? Or is it more a test of weather guessing and endurance. At least contest pilots are flying to the same general locations in area tasks! Not everyone wants to fly for 7 hours every day. Not everyone wants to be unconstrained by some form of a race track. And if you're not constrained by any form of time or track, is it really a meaningful competition? I for one don't think so.

My point is that you have to have some basic rules in order to have meaningful competition! Simple comes at a great cost to competition quality and, in my case at least, competitive satisfaction.

If I had it my way (let the flaming begin), I would forbid all forms of area tasking entirely and never allow it again! ;-) I would also take out start gate roulette by having only Grand Prix starts or a very short starting time range (say 10 minutes). This, for me, would represent true sailplane racing and would become fundamentally more satisfying from a competition standpoint . The rule book and scoring program would be far, far simpler. To be honest I would like to see Grand Prix style racing take hold in the US. I am actually working on doing a Grand Prix contest next summer.

For me, OLC goes in the opposite direction and completely takes away the idea of real racing. For me OLC would be unsatisfying if it was the only choice for sailplane competition. Sure I would do an OLC contest for fun to hang out, especially out west. But OLC is in no way a real competition in my opinion. It's a little like going sailboat cruising or sailboat racing. Entirely different things.

Finally, I agree that 10 day competitions are a little long at times. That said on the east coast 10 days may only yield 3 or 4 competition days (or less). A 7 day contest may only yield 2 or 3 if the weather is poor. This is a difficult topic for sure. I would prefer 7 day competitions but obviously am willing to do 10. We flew 7 contest days, 2 practice days and 3 days prior to the practice days in Minden. That's 12 days of flying in 14 days. Not bad, but then again that was Minden, NV. The bottom line here is that participation would be higher if he competition was shorter because fewer and fewer are willing to commit the time to go to sailplane contests. But also once you give away 10 days for 7, the next group will begin to complain and want 5. A sport has to require some level of personal commitment. Sailing has already gone from week long nationals to 3 days in many cases (Fri, Sat, Sun). It did help participation, but the quality of the racing has dropped.

Respectfully a different view,

Sean



On Tuesday, July 15, 2014 6:25:09 AM UTC-4, wrote:
As a still under 40, very active standard class pilot with an LS8 and a Duckhawk on order, and who has flown a few regionals and one nationals (Montague 2012), I'll chime in with a few observations about why I haven't been very motivated to fly any US-based competitions this year.



(1) Time commitment. I'm lucky, I own a successful business and have a good deal of flexibility with my vacation time. Never-the-less, I don't feel the current format provides enough satisfaction relative to the time away from work and family. It's not that I don't enjoy extended periods of flying, rather it's that I find competition flying is overly focused on rules, classing, and relatively short speed tasks that quickly become repetitive.



Taking two weeks off, to fly maybe six or seven days, with the average flying time being a bit over three hours (plus the time screwing around before the gate opens) just feels like a waste compared to doing flights elsewhere that maximizes the day.



This might make me sound like someone who is just not a good fit for competition flying, but I strongly disagree, I absolutely enjoy flying faster and further than the other pilots around me (just ask my friends). But the OLC and Skylines Project provide enough of a scoring measure of to satisfy the "who won the day" urge, which brings me to my next observation.



(2) The OLC has put the old-school competition out of business. Humans like games and the OLC and, more recently, Skylines Project, have a better game. They have done a superb job of creating a modern competition venue for gliding that's simple and satisfying. So far as I can tell, the gliding competition community is making small tweaks, but not radically re-thinking how they will create a better game that complements the online contests.



(3) Lack of satisfying flights makes your game boring. With online contests making every day an ad hoc contest, and with a scoring mechanism that has been deemed "good enough" based on participation, it seems to me that a regional or national contest should be about creating an environment where you're going to fly deeply satisfying flights. Yet, this is clearly not the focus of the current competition structure. Comps are about interpreting the rules and being cunning at leveraging them to your advantage, hours are wasted playing start gate roulette, tasking is usually uninteresting and does not reward the adventurous pilot, and where we must go to fly is largely dictated by what we fly, rather than where we really want to fly. Guys, this is a really boring game that very few people can play in a given year.



We don't have to run competitions this way. Last January, I flew Competition Enterprise Omarama with G Dale and Gavin Wills. This was my second time flying in New Zealand, and I fully intend to fly this competition next year because it was so damn fun. The competition format is actually the creation of Philip Wills and was exported from the UK:



http://competitionenterprise.wordpress.com/



This is a very different approach to running a competition, with very simple rules that are incentivize participation, creative tasking, and "enterprising" flights. Pilot elected start times and never any start gate games. Simple handicapping and creative tasking that makes it possible for a DG300 to fly in the same comp as an ASG 29 and have a reasonable chance of winning. And even without a "pure" racing class and painstakingly crafted scoring rules there was general agreement that the scoring made sense, and everyone felt like they had very nearly maximized each soaring day.



I enjoyed this style of competition so much that I organized a version out of Ephrata in May with very positive feedback from the pilots that took part over a four day period. I look forward to organizing and flying it again next year if there is pilot interest. Maybe we should do it at Nephi, seems like they get a good pilot turnout there.



Chris Young

42DJ