Calling a Good Task

All of this banter about classes, and what's fair or not for a class, leads me to a couple of questions. Now, please understand that I am not a competition pilot so forgive if I sound a bit naive. I have been doing a little online research but don't find a lot of information...or I'm looking in the wrong place!

First, what constitutes a good task? Is there an established set of criteria used when evaluating weather, site, and aircraft?

Second, has there been any effort to programmatically "call" a task based on a set of criteria?...like the above mentioned factors. I don't believe you can substitute good human judgement with a set of executable instructions ...but it may be helpful to use technology to assist with task calling given what seems like a very complex set of variables. Who knows, maybe the task caller could do some sort of Monte Carlo simulations for a task, given all the variables, and have results showing the probability of success for a number of potential tasks!

Any thoughts? How about references on task calling?

Brad A.

On Nov 19, 9:17*pm, Brad Alston
wrote:
All of this banter about classes, and what's fair or not for a class,
leads me to a couple of questions. Now, please understand that I am not
a competition pilot so forgive if I sound a bit naive. I have been doing
a little online research but don't find a lot of information...or I'm
looking in the wrong place!

First, what constitutes a good task? Is there an established set of
criteria used when evaluating weather, site, and aircraft?

Second, has there been any effort to programmatically "call" a task
based on a set of criteria?...like the above mentioned factors. I don't
believe you can substitute good human judgement with a set of executable
instructions ...but it may be helpful to use technology to assist with
task calling given what seems like a very complex set of variables. Who
knows, maybe the task caller could do some sort of Monte Carlo
simulations for a task, given all the variables, and have results
showing the probability of success for a number of potential tasks!

Any thoughts? How about references on task calling?

Brad A.

--
Brad Alston

There's lots of good advice in the appendix to US contest rules
https://www.ssa.org/files/member/201...ss%20Rules.pdf
start reading at page 26

The "guide to competition"
https://www.ssa.org/files/member/SSA...ion%202011.pdf
has good advice oriented towards the pilots, see p. 13

the safety checklist also has a few good tips
https://www.ssa.org/files/member/Org...k%20Topics.pdf

if the links don't work, this is all from the ssa webpage under rules
and process

John Cochrane

Thank you for the references John. After an evening of reading, I see the only real criteria for good task calling is that they are safe and fair.

Safety seems to be fairly easy to understand; things like reducing the risk for collision at the start, on course (around turnpoints and such), or at the finish of a task. In addition, providing adequate safe land-out opportunities, should the need arise, along the course line for the task. I would think everyone involved in a competition would be in agreement with having a safe task.

So I've concluded, maybe incorrectly, that the issue raising most of the "stink" is all about what is a "fair" task. With the variety of sailplanes available (handicaps), variability of weather, pilot skill level, terrain, and etcetera, I can understand why there might be some difficulty with this aspect of tasking.

I still think there may be a way to provide some sort of automated decision support for task calling...now to try and quantify those contributing factors!

Anyone out there willing to share their opinion from an experience as to why they feel a particular task at a particular contest was safe AND fair?