The acronym for the Murray Evans Scoring System is MESS which more than adequately describes it. The problem was that at the time there were 3 classes, Standard, 15M and Open and only 4 slots per country at a World contest despite the IGC or its predecessor having created a 3rd Class some years before. Yes the IGC is run by fairly stupid people and they are still promoting them into these positions. It seems to be a requirement.
So a method of comparing results across Classes was required. There was considerable pressure from the pilots to have some objective system and Murray came up with this system. The real aim was to pretend to have an objective system but retain the ability of the senior silly old farts in the GFA to select who they wanted to send as with their superior wisdom and knowledge they could send people more likely to do well OS than those who had merely won contests. (*/sarc off) So the MESS had a number of coefficients that could be adjusted post facto to obtain the desired results.
The whole issue of team selection became very contentious before the 1974 World Contest at Waikerie when at the previous Nationals at Waikerie the favourite for selection who had won many Nationals before and was a Waikerie local "only" came second in the vastly numerically superior Standard Class and the powers that be decided this just wasn't good enough and they dropped him and selected an new young promising candidate - who had come third in Open class and who wasn't a local from the area the World contest would be flown in.
Didn't work out so well but failure never stopped TPTB in the GFA from forging ahead with fatally flawed policies or procedures and even the objective outcomes of such always failed to convince TPTB that they had ever been wrong.
So we have the state of gliding today and you folk who are trying to sell expensive sailplanes into the used market will know all is not rosy in the garden.
Mike _______________________________________________ Aus-soaring mailing list Aus-soaring@lists.internode.on.net To check or change subscription details, visit: http://lists.internode.on.net/mailman/listinfo/aus-soaring
