US Competition Pilot Poll and Election

On Tuesday, October 11, 2016 at 1:17:27 PM UTC-4, Dan Marotta wrote:
Valid points, but income has gone up to match prices for the most part.
When I left the USAF in 1979 as a Captain on flight status, my pay was
roughly $25K. I spoke with an AF captain recently and she told me her
pay is about $85K. Neither of us could afford a new glider at our then
and now incomes.

...And I recall paying a low of $0.199/gallon during a gas war in the
60s. Many things have gone up and down(!) since the good old days. The
price of gas was just an easy one to remember. I recall a co-worker in
1968 paid $12K for a HOUSE... My Stemme cost a lot less than most
houses I'd live in today.

Fun to reminisce,
Dan

On 10/11/2016 11:05 AM, Jonathan St. Cloud wrote:
Yeah, gas was actually about a dollar plus (say $1.20) back then (mid-eighties). As a student of a good debate, I hardly think comparing the capital price paid for a toy, to a resource that must be purchased weekly or more often to be mobile in our daily lives is germane. Yes the cost of everything has gone up. But when a non-nessessaity reaches a certain price point the market saturation changes.


On Tuesday, October 11, 2016 at 8:21:11 AM UTC-7, Dan Marotta wrote:
And a gallon of gas was $0.30 back then, too. So do we all stop driving?


--
Dan, 5J

When I bought my first glass ship in 1976 it cost a year's pay for a young engineer.
My most recent glider- not quite new, cost 1-1/2 year's pay.
The real difference in terms of gliders that can go to the event and compete is that we, in the US, have Club and Sports where a $20k glider, or maybe less, has the possibility of being competitive.
The things pilots report as the biggest barriers are time and money. Time being the commitment of a week or more of very dear vacation and the cost for travel and living expenses to attend.
FWIW
UH

On Friday, October 7, 2016 at 9:59:01 AM UTC-4, Sean wrote:

Beyond that simple value is, of course, the removal of the US rules scoring software development burden (and ease of use issue). Guy has been a champion of volunteerism. An amazing, giving man. But eventually we need to stop burdening him with this endless project, especially if all that hard work is not providing any measurable return on his investment.

Thanks, but I think I am the best judge of whether I am being burdened or not. I am now working on Winscore for 2017 which I plan will be a major update primarily in improving flight log evaluation and scoring automation.

If anyone has any Winscore "Pet Peeves", now is the time to contact me with them so I can add them to the list.

UH speaks the truth - all the other stuff that came after the original post is insignificant to new/upcoming/potential possible contest pilots.

Our current business model demands that pilots wishing to get really good - need to be very young (where time is not the issue) or older/retired/self employed with a very understanding spouse (where both money and time become less an issue). (wealthy also doesn't hurt)

The dwindling numbers problem exists in most established sports these days. There is hope - Bruno in UT seems to be doing OK - OLC has defiantly got XC flying moving - and the Sr contest is always hard to get into. (and there are lots more good spots.)

I bet none of the 3 would say that the FAI vs US rules are all that much of a hurdle.

maybe a question like "What keeps you from doing 6 contest a year?" or "how many OLC flights did you post last year?" - "how many miles did you fly last year?" "What do you need to fly more?" would be interesting. I am sure this is outside the current need of this poll - it is fine as is.

If you want the US to be a force in Soaring you need allot of people flying allot of miles - how? is a really hard thing to figure out. Especially in a country the is enormous with pilots spread out.

We have great people in a beautiful sport - so ..... there is always hope - but hope does work better with some planning & new ideas

WH

On Tuesday, October 11, 2016 at 4:20:57 PM UTC-4, Guy Byars wrote:

Thanks, but I think I am the best judge of whether I am being burdened or not. I am now working on Winscore for 2017 which I plan will be a major update primarily in improving flight log evaluation and scoring automation.

If anyone has any Winscore "Pet Peeves", now is the time to contact me with them so I can add them to the list.

Thank you Guy. I appreciate your commitment to improve Winscore and the effort you volunteer.

Winscore is a great program. And Guy is very responsive to calls for help from a contest.

My main pet peeves/requests are 1) automatically find the best scoring start 2) automatically handle finishes below MSH 3) automatically find best scoring MAT turnpoints.

A fourth -- harder -- is to find a better export system so pilots can check their scores and diagnose problems. (If the scorer manually makes a wrong edit log, there is no way on earth for you to know. If the scorer manually edits someone else's log, or assigns a wrong penalty, there is no way for you to know that either.) The only way I know to do that now is to ask for the full export of the contest.

Almost all "problems with winscore" are really problems that the scorer doesn't know the rules. That's not a complaint about scorers -- most pilots don't know the rules needed to score a contest either. Scoring takes a deep knowledge of lots of details of the rules. Simpler rules are a better answer..

John Cochrane

My points exactly above...

On Saturday, October 8, 2016 at 7:16:44 PM UTC+2, Tango Eight wrote:

I'm not opposed to this. But there someone has to publish a lot of background info so that well informed choices can be made. Sean, bless his heart, isn't dong a very good job of that right now (because with him what isn't personal is some dark conspiracy), so maybe *you* can give it a try.


That is an important point. If we are going to ask people to voice an opinion on something with all kinds complexities and non-obvious implications, we will need to adequately specify the question(s) or the answers will be the proverbial "garbage in - garbage out". That's not a trivial task. The RC agonizes over how to ask questions for issues that are on people's minds in a way that avoids uninformed feedback as much as possible. Sometimes we succeed at it.

Having just gone through the task of figuring out how to poll on a far, far simpler set of questions on US rules complexity this year and having tried, personally, to start a side-by-side "FAI to US" rules comparison about a year ago I have come to the conclusion that just asking a hypothetical question (at minimum for anyone who hasn't flown both FAI and US rules) "Adopt FAI rules in the US - Y/N?" in a poll would do more harm than good. It would be used as a bludgeon by the proponents of the response with more votes and attacked as a "clearly biased" or "inadequate" question by proponents of the response with fewer votes, so hip-shooting a poll question is, IMHO, a terrible idea. It'll take some further work to figure out what question(s) might be useful and constructive - starting with a clear description of the "proposal" and at least some factual analysis of the most important differences and their implications - like this year's "rules complexity" questions, with considerably more explanation of issues and implications. Then we might get a somewhat more informed read.

Or we can just have a food fight about it.

I fully expect this topic to come up at the November RC meeting.

9B

On Tuesday, October 11, 2016 at 6:43:17 AM UTC-7, wrote:

Wilbur,
Do I know you? Have you been racing at all? Why do you hide behind that name? Is your real name Sean? I for one still enjoy glider races, we do them at our club every weekend. You should have learned from the present election mud fight that negativity gets you exactly nowhere.
Herb Kilian, J7

is an email address of John Miller, who, among other duties, serves as a PR agent for a very excellent glider racer...many people say he is probably the best racer in the history of soaring, ever, believe me.

You can read more about Wilbur/John he

https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...6e0_story.html

;-)

9B

This is huge Andy, thanks for the information.

On Wednesday, October 12, 2016 at 12:29:26 PM UTC-7, Andy Blackburn wrote:
You can read more about Wilbur/John he

https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...6e0_story.html

;-)

9B

On Wednesday, October 12, 2016 at 2:46:23 PM UTC-5, Jonathan St. Cloud wrote:
This is huge Andy, thanks for the information.

No, Jonathan. That would be "Yuuge".

:-)