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From: Mike Lachowski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ...F3j with the current rules is broken. It is very much the luck of the timer. I know the past few team selections, which timer you had was good for a 1 second difference in flight time.... ============== Mike's point may sound arcane, but it is actually central to ensuring the fairness of this event. I made this point after the 2006 and especially the 2004 WCs. An awful lot is decided by a few tenths of a second. There is an inherent error band in the timing of stopping the watch, and an even far greater error band in starting it. And there is the judgment call with respect to overflying the window, which Larry Jolly pointed out as a source of errors this year. In 2004, the WC top places were decided by an amount less than the possible timing error. The FAI rules committee should spend a little time talking to experts in statistics and quality control about how to tweak the rules so that the difference in pilot performance will be much greater than differences occasioned by the nerve pathways of the timer.
