Contest Class Development for Future Success - The Case fordeveloping the Handicapped Classes

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