On Wednesday, April 15, 2020 at 9:30:32 PM UTC-6, John Cochrane wrote:
Given the controversy over hard deck, it is unlikely to happen in the US, at least until the IGC puts it in under pressure from the Germans and the "fly IGC rules" crowd faces an interesting conundrum.

The video had lots of other good ideas for breaking up gaggles. Some of them sounded too complicated to me, or have perverse incentives -- extra points for being the leader for example.

Two that did sound useful are 1) the PEV 10 minute rule and 2) using the start-finish height difference rather than fixed start height and finish gate.

There have been PEV rules before, where you had to hit the PEV to designate a "real" start. This allowed top pilots to fake a start and shake off the gaggle. That hasn't caught on, I think in part because doing fake starts is a PITA. Hitting PEV to say "I want to start 10 minutes from now", with maybe a 5 minute window after that (or penalites) sounds interesting. What could go wrong?

The proposal that your finish height is, say 3000' lower than your start height has been around for a while. I didn't see the advantage, but now I do. Trying to get the exact top of the cylinder takes a lot of work. If you just finish 500 feet lower, you can start in a more relaxed way. That also makes it easier to designate your start 10 minutes ahead of time . Otherwise you hit PEV and of course instantly the thermal you're in dissipates.

These seem worth talking about and won't offend pilots who like to win by being willing to go lower than anyone else. '

John Cochrane BB

I'm new to soaring and haven't learned all the rules with regard to racing or contest flying yet. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but don't we already have a requirement for official record attempts that the finish altitude needs to be within a certain altitude of the start altitude? If so, then why not adopt this in the racing/contest scene?