Good morning, I felt compelled to throw something out for comment, but we in the Tidewater Model Soaring Society (TMSS) have been messing around with club contest formats, as it seems many others have been doing. I was the CD in December, and had a somewhat different event to try-out.
Basically, the concept of rounds was kind of abandoned and we blended in a constant-task ladder event with a nominal 10-minute task. Here are the details: 1) The first round was basic 10-minute duration, open winch, with FAI landing tapes. You needed a timer for this round. The need for this round will be clearer after you read the rest. 2) After the first round, we flew non-precision duration 10-minute tasks, still with the FAI tapes. Pilots needed some way of knowing when they reached 10-minutes of airtime, then they could shoot the landing and didn't need someone timing them. The resulting score was 10:00 plus whatever the landing was if the flight was 10-minutes or more. If the flight was less than 10:00 minutes, the score was zero (no landing either). Everyone was on their honor. 3) The winner was whoever had the highest score. You could fly as many times as you wanted (within the established contest window of 10am to 4pm, or until all gave-up) and use whatever launch equipment you had as long as it didn't out-perform the single club winch. This format enabled all to fly a lot and was kind of man-on-man, just not on a per-round fashion. The man-on-man part was on a per-day basis. So, it was fly or be buried, no excuses. The need for the first round was to avoid anyone having a zero score for the day (i.e. juice box and a snack ;-)) and provided some finer separation, if needed. Some free benefits occurred: pop-offs, bad-air, bad-luck, etc, were no longer meaningful issues. If you didn't like your flight, do it again. Seems like many liked it, though some boycotted it. Perhaps re-arranging pilot classes could help (i.e. I am here to fly my blank-off and bury everyone class, or I am here to fly, sort of, but want a 2+-hour lunch break class). It would be interesting to see if this concept could be scaled-up. Perhaps the advent of 2.4 gig technology could help alleviate potential frequency issues with applying this to a larger event. Thoughts? Thanks, Josh.
