OK, enough skeg mail. Let's move on. A lot of the discussion here has been driven by the sentiment that soaring contests aren't fair. The same people win all the time, its a landing contest, its a flight time contest, fliers cheat by using skegs, yadi yadi yadi ya......
Here''s my solution: As the score keeper for the ESL I have access to quite a few years of history of anyone who has flown in an ESL-sanctioned contest, whether the fier is an ESL member or not. This season I am going to implement a handicapping system and post handicapped results. The handicapping process isn't sanctioned by the ESL and is a purely personal effort. But by maintaining the system and posting the scores I hope to convince the ESL, and possibly the greater soaring community that handicapping is a good idea and will make contests "fairer" and winnable by any flier without resorting to classes. I am going to model the system on golf handicapping. The base metric of non-handicapped performance will be the normalized performance (percent of the winner's score) adjusted by the spread of the contest (the percentage of pilots with normalized scores of 90 and above). The latter adjustment is intended to eliminate the effects of "easy" vs "hard" contests, usually driven by the wind strength and thermal activity. The handicap is calculated as the average adjusted score for the most recent X contests for a pilot with the worst Y% thrown away. Did not complete all round contests are not included. Once we have a handicap we can calculate a handicapped contest result as the adjusted score divided by the handicap. A score of 1.00 means that you have flown to your handicap. Less than 1 means that you underperformed and one greater than one that you have flown better than your handicap. The person with the highest handicapped score has "won" the handicapped contest. The fundamental concept is that you get rewarded for flying better than your handicap. The throwaways are a mechanism to eliminate poor results caused by equipment failure or sandbagging. If it works properly it won't matter if contests are dominated by duration, landing, or whatever. You compete against yourself, or rather your historical performance. Anker RCSE-List facilities provided by Model Airplane News. Send "subscribe" and "unsubscribe" requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please note that subscribe and unsubscribe messages must be sent in text only format with MIME turned off.
