On Monday, January 1, 2018 at 2:56:02 PM UTC-8, wrote:
Too much b.s. In the name of safety or "fairness", the continued dumbing down of the skill set needed to race. Dump all the finish rules, allow guys to make a flying finish no lower than 200 ft. Or a rolling finish, no penalty. Land short and you get distance points only. Start your motor and you get distance points. Why all the intricacies? There wasn't anything wrong with how we did it 20 years ago.

I don't recall a 200' limit back in the good old days. You could scrape gelcoat off on the runway and get a good finish and pull up to buttonhook a pattern.

The only difference was then you didn't have GPS and a glide computer. My recollection was final glides had a lot more buffer on them because you were never 100% sure of your position or the winds so you generally didn't try a best L/D glide from beyond visual range to 0'. Of course glide computers offer more precision than accuracy in these situations, so you can end up in a pickle if you depend on one being that good at predicting the future.

I wrote a computer program to calculate final glides from the ground for the New Zealand Team at the 1983 WGC. The pilots would report distance and we'd estimate winds from the ground and give them height needed to get home. I didn't include any buffer and landed them both out one day a couple of miles short somewhere out in the desert west of Hobbs. Oops!

9B