On Sep 10, 6:45*am, John Cochrane
wrote:
On Sep 10, 1:11*am, SoaringMaps Team wrote:





On Sep 9, 2:02*pm, "kirk.stant" wrote:

But it's not that simple. *How does the scorer know where you declared
your intention to abort? *The person that won the day was also
thinking of aborting at the first turn and followed a similar route
back to yours. Conditions then improved and he made a large detour to
get back toward the second turnpoint. *Maybe you would have done the
same thing. How would you have cancelled your intention to abort?

I think the FAI rules would have handled this situation just fine.
You would have been scores as landing out at the class C boundary and
the distance on that leg would have been scored as progress toward the
second turnpoint.

Andy

How does the scorer know where to score to if someone aborts
normally? *Doesn't the scoring program look for the farthest logger
point in the direction of the next turnpoint (that isn't actually
reached) to determine how to score distance, after it determines that
the task wasn't completed? *Then it would seem easy to not assess a
violation for any airspace incursion after that point is determined.
The scorer shouldn't have to do anything.

But I admit I'm assuming a lot about Winscore, so may very well be
completely wrong about this.

Kirk

I can definitely lay out some tasks in relation to restricted areas
(like Class C's) where the pilot would be required to backtrack away
from the next turnpoint (and home) to avoid the -100 point outcome if
s/he abandoned the task and elected to traverse the restricted area.
This would require careful piloting to ensure that your greatest
progress towards the next turnpoint was outside the restricted area.
To make this really obvious imagine that the second to last turn is
across a Class C from home and the last turn is a steering turn just
20 miles abeam of the finish. *You'd have to do some clever
trigonometry to figure out how to cross the Class C after making the
second to last turn in order to get home without making progress
towards the final turn within the restricted area.

9B

But this answer displays some of the wisdom of current policy. We
don't allow flight in or over class C because it would give a
competitive advantage to those having a transponder. Originally, it
seemed like "but the race is over, so there's no competitive
advantage" was a good argument. But in this and a previous example,
it's clear that being able to press on while keeping the option alive
to glide home over the class C is a definite competitive advantage.

Bottom line, though: Given the amount of complaining from many people
about complex rules, carving out an airspace exception to fly over
class C as "self retrieve" doesn't seem like a good idea.

For a non-sanctioned contest, make up your own rules and do whatever
you want.

If a sanctioned contest really wants to do this, they should apply for
a rules waiver. It might make sense at El Tiro given the very odd
geometry of the Tucson class C relative to El Tiro and the soaring
area. That lets you adapt rules to local conditions without us having
to write some nightmare into the rules that apply to everyone.

John Cochrane

Agreed. Adding an exception to the rule would create a fair amount of
complexity in rule language, pilot decision-making AND scoring -
that's a triple negative. The case I was illustrating to make the
point was of a pilot who heads for home across restricted airspace
thinking he's okay because he abandoned the task but accidentally
makes some additional progress towards the next turn and gets minus
100 points anyway. The case of pilots who can head out over tiger
country on the far side of restricted airspace because they have an
"out" that another pilot without a transponder doesn't have is another
issue that speaks to fairness.

There is an analogous situation in the current rules. At the Sports
Nationals this year there was one task where a courseline choice that
took you out over a lot of unlandable terrain got you to much better
conditions and higher overall speeds. Most (but not all) of the guys
who went there had motors. I spoke to one pilot about how he thought
about the landout options out there and he said "I didn't".

Despite lots of rules to try to level the playing field the thought of
a dicey outlanding 100 miles from home in the middle of the desert
does affect decision-making. I'm not convinced there's anything to be
done about it - just pointing it out. You could imagine use of the
motor requiring that you be marked back some of the distance made on
course to that point so as to compensate for the additional distance
made into questionable areas that a motor affords you. Of course the
problem with that is that it creates a disincentive for pilots with
motors to use them.

9B