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#61
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2019 SSA Contest Rules Pilot Opinion Poll Now Open
Watching this from the UK and finding it ever so entertaining -
thanks all. I've somehow managed to survive all of my competition years so far without meeting an untimely end. That includes a good number of landouts in the early years which, would you believe with decent training and without an unfounded and inflated percetion of risk were carried out incident free. I do especially enjoy that we can race on a level playing field, without having to create scoring formulae and task formats to make slower pilots feel like they've done better than they have. A sad consequence of this is that the slower pilots, who score much lower and land out more often are especially driven to improve and become quite formidable competition. What a bother. I know you're all fans of winscore (I had to look it up). If anyone would like to change to Seeyou then just ask myself or one of the many people around the world who are familiar with it to show you. I'm afraid this could take up to 10 minutes. Carry on! At 15:51 19 October 2019, John Godfrey QT wrote: On Wednesday, October 2, 2019 at 7:40:59 PM UTC-4, Andy Blackburn wrote: US contest pilots. The 2019 SSA Contest Rules Pilot Opinion Poll is now open and will remain open through October 20, 2019. You must be on the SSA Pilot Ranking List to participate. We look forward to your input. You can access the poll online at: http://www.adamsfive.com/a5soaring/survey/surveys.php Rich Owen is running unopposed for re-election to the Rules Committee. Consequently, Rich will return to his RC seat for a four-year term. Congratulations Rich! For the SSA Contest Rules Committee Andy Blackburn, Chair 9B Just a reminder here. In spite of the missives being written highlighting the "incredible downsides" of a "big switch" approach to adoption of FAI rules, that IS NOT WHAT IS ON THE TABLE. What is on the table (via the poll) is: SHOULD THE 2020 FAI CLASS NATIONALS BE TASKED AND SCORED ACCORDING TO FAI SC3A TASK DEFINITIONS AND SCORING FORMULAE AND THE RESULT EVALUATED. I am personally a bit confounded and disappointed at the resistance to this experiment by the introduction of all the "big switch - death panel" arguments, which are at best peripheral to the immediate decision. Record your opinion please. QT |
#62
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2019 SSA Contest Rules Pilot Opinion Poll Now Open
On Tuesday, October 29, 2019 at 10:15:10 AM UTC-6, Alex Okeefe wrote:
Watching this from the UK and finding it ever so entertaining - thanks all. I've somehow managed to survive all of my competition years so far without meeting an untimely end. That includes a good number of landouts in the early years which, would you believe with decent training and without an unfounded and inflated percetion of risk were carried out incident free. I do especially enjoy that we can race on a level playing field, without having to create scoring formulae and task formats to make slower pilots feel like they've done better than they have. A sad consequence of this is that the slower pilots, who score much lower and land out more often are especially driven to improve and become quite formidable competition. What a bother. I know you're all fans of winscore (I had to look it up). If anyone would like to change to Seeyou then just ask myself or one of the many people around the world who are familiar with it to show you. I'm afraid this could take up to 10 minutes. Carry on! At 15:51 19 October 2019, John Godfrey QT wrote: On Wednesday, October 2, 2019 at 7:40:59 PM UTC-4, Andy Blackburn wrote: US contest pilots. The 2019 SSA Contest Rules Pilot Opinion Poll is now open and will remain open through October 20, 2019. You must be on the SSA Pilot Ranking List to participate. We look forward to your input. You can access the poll online at: http://www.adamsfive.com/a5soaring/survey/surveys.php Rich Owen is running unopposed for re-election to the Rules Committee. Consequently, Rich will return to his RC seat for a four-year term. Congratulations Rich! For the SSA Contest Rules Committee Andy Blackburn, Chair 9B Just a reminder here. In spite of the missives being written highlighting the "incredible downsides" of a "big switch" approach to adoption of FAI rules, that IS NOT WHAT IS ON THE TABLE. What is on the table (via the poll) is: SHOULD THE 2020 FAI CLASS NATIONALS BE TASKED AND SCORED ACCORDING TO FAI SC3A TASK DEFINITIONS AND SCORING FORMULAE AND THE RESULT EVALUATED. I am personally a bit confounded and disappointed at the resistance to this experiment by the introduction of all the "big switch - death panel" arguments, which are at best peripheral to the immediate decision. Record your opinion please. QT I can't speak for everyone in the US, but I feel it is safe to say that real practical training for land-outs, at least in the US is very poor. We read about the theory of it, and get verbal instruction from our instructors on it. But it would be very seldom that it is actually done on purpose. I believe this is largely due to the type of training gliders most people fly here in the US--the SGS 2-33. It is a real bear to take apart and trailer back to the gliderport after a land-out, and would likely take a large crew of people working on it for a large part of the day to accomplish this. As such, folks around here--at least where I trained in WA, are very apprehensive about land-outs, and at least with the newer generation of pilots, very inexperienced in it. Of course, there are individual exceptions to this, but I think it is a safe generalization to make. |
#63
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2019 SSA Contest Rules Pilot Opinion Poll Now Open
On Tue, 29 Oct 2019 12:10:49 -0700, John Foster wrote:
I can't speak for everyone in the US, but I feel it is safe to say that real practical training for land-outs, at least in the US is very poor. We read about the theory of it, and get verbal instruction from our instructors on it. But it would be very seldom that it is actually done on purpose. I believe this is largely due to the type of training gliders most people fly here in the US--the SGS 2-33. It is a real bear to take apart and trailer back to the gliderport after a land-out, and would likely take a large crew of people working on it for a large part of the day to accomplish this. As such, folks around here--at least where I trained in WA, are very apprehensive about land-outs, and at least with the newer generation of pilots, very inexperienced in it. Of course, there are individual exceptions to this, but I think it is a safe generalization to make. In the UK the necessary training for XC flying (Navigation, Field selection and Field Landing) tends to be done in Touring Motor Gliders, e.g Grob G109 or Scheibe SF-25. My club uses an SF-25 for this. With a bit of power on the SF-25 approximates an ASK-21 well enough for this exercise, so a field can be selected and the circuit and landing approach flown, with power going on again when either its obvious its going wrong (so try again) or its clear the landing would be good and in a well-chosen field. None of these three are pass/fail exercises - its normal to do them until both instructor and student are happy. However, I realise that this may not work for smaller US clubs - no rentable SF-25s or G-109s in the locality would be a show stopper, along with, quite possibly, no TMG-current instructors. FWIW in my club its normal for a new solo pilot to fly SZD Juniors until they have their Bronze badge, and often Silver height and duration as well, since all these can be done with local soaring. Then they go for Silver distance on the next suitable day after getting signed-off for their exercises in the SF-25. I did Bronze and Silver in a Junior off the winch and only then got my aero-tow sign-off and converted onto the club's Pegase 90 and Discus As. -- Martin | martin at Gregorie | gregorie dot org |
#64
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2019 SSA Contest Rules Pilot Opinion Poll Now Open
"I've somehow managed to survive all of my competition years so far
without meeting an untimely end. That includes a good number of landouts in the early years which, would you believe with decent training and without an unfounded and inflated percetion of risk were carried out incident free." "I put this revolver to my head, pulled the trigger 3 times and it hasn't gone off yet. It must be safe" I thought we in aviation got rid of this sort of thinking about safety a long time ago. Two words: selection bias. I read Sailplane and Gliding, the wonderful UK publication. The incident reports in the back of the magazine are full of landout damage, much of it in contests. I would be curious whether the fraction of UK pilots who fly contests is any greater than the number in the US. My impression from S&G is an active contest scene, like the east coast of the US -- and a whole lot of pilots who do not touch the stuff. John Cochrane |
#65
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2019 SSA Contest Rules Pilot Opinion Poll Now Open
FAI Annex A rules (which are undergoing massive change) do not drive pilots to land out. Many WGCs and EGCs are run in eastern Europe and gliding/competition culture there is different. It is common to set task to sky that is totally dead. First turnpoint or even start point in steady rain? No problem, just go. And then we have 130 outlandings.
We have run nationals using Annex A for decades with very little problem of outlandings. Usually AAT is set on trickier days and if it's raining, we do not feel obliged to fly. It is very convenient to blame rulebook for bad task setting. I should add that proposed scoring change to Annex A (by USA) creates MASSIVE incentive to scratch home over the last trees and creates a huge outlanding risk. If I'm not wrong the same people here complaining the risk level introduced by Annex A rules actually drafted that proposal. |
#66
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2019 SSA Contest Rules Pilot Opinion Poll Now Open
Hi John,
Thanks for the response. I'm not really looking to get involved but I suppose I must respond as I believe fear mongering around landouts may account for part of the US reluctance to progress and people need to see both sides of the argument, not just the opinion of one or two stubborn individuals whenever someone mentions change. Of course it's not completely safe. Very few aviation activities are. I'm sure you yourself have completed many takeoffs and landings safely, yet accidents happen there too. Do we blame the takeoffs and landings? should we find a way of reducing them? Maybe golf? No wonder there is apprehension around the topic when we have people comparing landing out to putting a revolver to ones head. If we were to use that analogy though I would point out that I've been trained not to put any rounds in it. I'd have a hard time getting hold of one though, here in the UK we just wave our fists at one another. A good example of selection bias would be noting that a community that lands out extremely regularly does have accidents now and then, and deducing from this data that the chances of an accident are high despite knowing only the final output figure. I might add, by far the most field retrieves I see happen during the course of normal club flying, rather than at contests. I wonder what rules are driving these non competitors to landout?.. At 23:48 29 October 2019, John Cochrane wrote: "I've somehow managed to survive all of my competition years so far without meeting an untimely end. That includes a good number of landouts in the early years which, would you believe with decent training and without an unfounded and inflated percetion of risk were carried out incident free." "I put this revolver to my head, pulled the trigger 3 times and it hasn't gone off yet. It must be safe" I thought we in aviation got rid of this sort of thinking about safety a long time ago. Two words: selection bias. I read Sailplane and Gliding, the wonderful UK publication. The incident reports in the back of the magazine are full of landout damage, much of it in contests. I would be curious whether the fraction of UK pilots who fly contests is any greater than the number in the US. My impression from S&G is an active contest scene, like the east coast of the US -- and a whole lot of pilots who do not touch the stuff. John Cochrane |
#67
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2019 SSA Contest Rules Pilot Opinion Poll Now Open
Hi John,
Thanks for the response. I'm not really looking to get involved but I suppose I must respond as I believe fear mongering around landouts may account for part of the US reluctance to progress and people need to see both sides of the argument, not just the opinion of one or two stubborn individuals whenever someone mentions change. Of course it's not completely safe. Very few aviation activities are. I'm sure you yourself have completed many takeoffs and landings safely, yet accidents happen there too. Do we blame the takeoffs and landings? should we find a way of reducing them? Maybe golf? No wonder there is apprehension around the topic when we have people comparing landing out to putting a revolver to ones head. If we were to use that analogy though I would point out that I've been trained not to put any rounds in it. I'd have a hard time getting hold of one though, here in the UK we just wave our fists at one another. A good example of selection bias would be noting that a community that lands out extremely regularly does have accidents now and then, and deducing from this data that the chances of an accident are high despite knowing only the final output figure. I might add, by far the most field retrieves I see happen during the course of normal club flying, rather than at contests. I wonder what rules are driving these non competitors to landout?.. At 23:48 29 October 2019, John Cochrane wrote: "I've somehow managed to survive all of my competition years so far without meeting an untimely end. That includes a good number of landouts in the early years which, would you believe with decent training and without an unfounded and inflated percetion of risk were carried out incident free." "I put this revolver to my head, pulled the trigger 3 times and it hasn't gone off yet. It must be safe" I thought we in aviation got rid of this sort of thinking about safety a long time ago. Two words: selection bias. I read Sailplane and Gliding, the wonderful UK publication. The incident reports in the back of the magazine are full of landout damage, much of it in contests. I would be curious whether the fraction of UK pilots who fly contests is any greater than the number in the US. My impression from S&G is an active contest scene, like the east coast of the US -- and a whole lot of pilots who do not touch the stuff. John Cochrane |
#68
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2019 SSA Contest Rules Pilot Opinion Poll Now Open
At 07:14 30 October 2019, krasw wrote:
I should add that proposed scoring change to Annex A (by USA) creates MASSIVE incentive to scratch home over the last trees and creates a huge out landing risk. There is already a strong incentive to scratch home and pretty much everyone I fly against in the UK 15s would do so anyway. I like the proposal as it simplifies the scoring rules. Sensible pilots will choose a flat landable field before the line that can be used safely if they cannot make the hedge. In circumstances where there is a finish ring the decision to land will probably be made higher and with reduced risk. Landing out is a integral part of competition flying in gliders. We train for it and do it regularly. If you fly a motor glider (dig) then you probably are less current and more at risk when the engine doesn't behave. Jim |
#69
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2019 SSA Contest Rules Pilot Opinion Poll Now Open
On Wednesday, October 30, 2019 at 12:15:07 PM UTC+2, Jim White wrote:
At 07:14 30 October 2019, krasw wrote: I should add that proposed scoring change to Annex A (by USA) creates MASSIVE incentive to scratch home over the last trees and creates a huge out landing risk. There is already a strong incentive to scratch home and pretty much everyone I fly against in the UK 15s would do so anyway. I like the proposal as it simplifies the scoring rules. Sensible pilots will choose a flat landable field before the line that can be used safely if they cannot make the hedge. In circumstances where there is a finish ring the decision to land will probably be made higher and with reduced risk. Landing out is a integral part of competition flying in gliders. We train for it and do it regularly. If you fly a motor glider (dig) then you probably are less current and more at risk when the engine doesn't behave.. Jim If you are the one out of 50 pilots who gets home and others land out on the last field next to finish line, current scoring gives you maybe ten point spread over pilots landing out. Proposed scoring would increase this to 250 points (devaluation scheme applies to both, depending on the day). In my opinion the incentive is not the same. |
#70
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2019 SSA Contest Rules Pilot Opinion Poll Now Open
On Wednesday, October 30, 2019 at 8:55:15 AM UTC-4, krasw wrote:
On Wednesday, October 30, 2019 at 12:15:07 PM UTC+2, Jim White wrote: At 07:14 30 October 2019, krasw wrote: I should add that proposed scoring change to Annex A (by USA) creates MASSIVE incentive to scratch home over the last trees and creates a huge out landing risk. There is already a strong incentive to scratch home and pretty much everyone I fly against in the UK 15s would do so anyway. I like the proposal as it simplifies the scoring rules. Sensible pilots will choose a flat landable field before the line that can be used safely if they cannot make the hedge. In circumstances where there is a finish ring the decision to land will probably be made higher and with reduced risk. Landing out is a integral part of competition flying in gliders. We train for it and do it regularly. If you fly a motor glider (dig) then you probably are less current and more at risk when the engine doesn't behave. Jim If you are the one out of 50 pilots who gets home and others land out on the last field next to finish line, current scoring gives you maybe ten point spread over pilots landing out. Proposed scoring would increase this to 250 points (devaluation scheme applies to both, depending on the day). In my opinion the incentive is not the same. Provides incentive to fly your own race, yes. That's a good thing. T8 |
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