Originally Posted by Windependence

I had a similar thought back when I read someone complaining that 10 minutes from 200m was way too easy an ALES task given modern planes. I was waiting for him to say that the NATS were too easy given the similarly high launches but that never came. Maybe Don can chime in here but I thought that the 200m starting altitude was selected because that was roughly how high the winch contests launched to.

Wayne

I don't know why it was selected. I come from the honey badger school on launch height -- I don't much care as long as everyone is playing the same game.

Much of the time when I practice, I set the switch at 100 meters. When we were still doing a lot of winch launches we would pace off 200 paces to the turnaround which is about 500 feet or 150 meters. In my old age, the memory dims, but it seems to me that I am having an easier time with the electrics from 200 than I had on our winch from whatever height it was set.

For guys concerned about turning our events into landing contests, however, the true test of the flight task should be that if less than 60 percent or so of flights max out, it is at the very least going to be a flying test. TK shared the raw results of a couple of NATS Open a few years back -- one that was run hard against 12 minute maxes and one which was mostly 10 minute maxes with adjustments downward for the early morning flights. These two contests had a lot of flights. And while neither one could be honestly characterized as a landing contest, the percent of maxes in the top 20 percent of finishers was materially greater in the 10 minute contest -- many of the rounds in the 10 minute contest might as well have not been normalized because somebody always maxed. Not so much for the 12 minute event.

That being said, I expected that the landings would be decisive. And in one sense they were -- you could not win without them. But a funny thing happened on the way to the market -- I scored both contests with and without landings and it turned out that among the top 20 percent finishers, their ultimate placement really did not change much no matter how you scored the landings. I looked at normalizing the landings with the flight scores, adding the landings to the normalized flight scores, reducing and increasing the points allotted for landings and those changes would not alter the final placements in very many cases.

Why is this? Because there is a high correlation between guys that fly well and guys that land well. Period.

It is important to ensure that the flight task is difficult enough that you have a material number of flight groups where the best flight time is something less than a max. But even when this is the case, over a lot of rounds, the times of the best guys in any particular round will usually not be all that different. In my opinion, you look at what's happening in the air. If you look at a score sheet and nearly every flight group has a max in it, the task might need to be stiffened up a bit. And if you look at overall results and more than 60 percent or so of all flights are maxes, the task might need to be stiffened up a bit.

A good task ought to be hard to achieve. After all, what really counts is staying up longer than anyone else -- sometimes our tasks just get in the way of this objective.

Happy Landings,

Don

I just zeroed all the landing scores in the two contests we have had this year and it made no difference in the placements.

In one contest the conditions were very bad and almost no one maxed. In the second contest we increased the time and there were about 20% of the flights close to max.

I think Don nailed it. The better pilots will get the best times AND the best landing scores far more consistently then the lesser pilots. So for the top dogs - yes its always going to be a landing contest to some degree.

Originally Posted by MrE

I think Don nailed it. The better pilots will get the best times AND the best landing scores far more consistently then the lesser pilots. So for the top dogs - yes its always going to be a landing contest to some degree.

Absolutely Mr. E, better pilots have repeatability from practice, experience, or just from working under presure. They can make screw ups work when other guys cannot make a good flight look good. We were very involved with horses and horse training, same thing there, a lot of folks can train, very few can make the performance work no matter what.

Marc

The following is not so much dealing with ALES as it influences contest pacing in any TD-like event ...

The one factor in the data that I gave to Don that should be noted here deals with choosing a task time and it has far more to do with running the contest than anything else:

When you have a large number of contestants, the task time must allow for a fluid movement of the contest. We can put essentially 8 flight groups on the field at the Nats or Masters if we push ... one group landing, one group flying, one group launching and one group staged. The other 4 "flight groups" are their timers. That's a lot of people wandering around the flight area. If you run short times, most everyone gets their times, and they are rushing back to the pits because whoever just timed is going to be called up soon. A really stinky sink cycle might put a low launched model from one group heading to the LZ before the prior pilot is setting up (or at the same time). So a short time becomes frenetic, things happen too fast.

Conversely, if you make the times too long (and too long is relative), you start having to wait to call groups to the staging area, wait for pins to come back (if you're still using numbered channels), etc. Sure, it's cool to back up the back-hoe and bury a bunch of your group who landed at 7 minutes while you got out and buried them with a max 15, but there are a lot of people who end up just being bored and standing around. A 20 minute task will pretty much guarantee that the best will get their times and a lot of people won't. The ones that don't will be bored, frustrated and will likely not ever come back.

We set the WSM task at 12 minutes (720 seconds) for a couple of reasons: It works with combining an 80 raw point landing (10% of the total score in value) into a nice even number for the normalization; every round is the same 12 minutes so there can be no confusion about the task, and, at least at this time, it is not possible to make 12 minutes without at least some zero sink during the flight. At 12 minutes, the contest pace is still pretty fluid, and the person who calls people to staging and the flight line can orchestrate a smooth contest. Push beyond 12 minutes into the 15+ area and things get slow really fast.

So for ALES, I would, as a CD, start with manipulation of the task times and then, when I started getting towards the point of bogging down the rounds with wait times, then start reducing the altitudes.

The TCMAA guys and my EFLAPS club have taken a slightly different tack for our first contests.

The vast majority of our flyers are complete newbies as far as never having flown in any type of contest at all. . On top of that, many of them are also relatively new, inexperienced pilots flying planes that are often poorly set up and/or poorly trimmed etc. Many of them had never tried to thermal before their first ALES contest.

We decided to start out with 6 minute target times. Thats a time even a newbie can hope to get if he doesnt screw up toooo badly.

On our last contest, the conditions were good for thermals for the first time this year and I felt that many of the guys had made some good improvements in there soaring skills, so I increased the time to 7 minutes. The best pilots still made their times but everyone else also did reasonably well without getting left in the dirt or made to feel like it was hopeless. We all had fun.

I will continue to increase the times during the next few months as more and more of our guys get to where they can - at least sometimes - make the time.

That keeps it fun for everyone.

By next year we may be doing nothing but 10 minute times or - if we have enough flyers - we may try a beginner and open class structure.

At a contest like the NATS you dont expect to have 80% of your flyers as raw newbies, so a different approach is needed.

I love the way its set up now - the CD has the freedom to taylor the contest to the conditions and the pilots.

Removed do to a brainfart

Some interesting numbers from the recent FAI F5J UK Championship. Of course, F5J allows competitors to set their own launch heights subject to a modest starting altitude penalty. Under that rule and in less than ideal conditions they flew 11 rounds, and put up 128 flights. 63 of those flights exceed 9 1/2 minutes with an average launch height for those flights of 165 meters.

Not suggesting anything at all about F5J. Just observing what launch altitudes more or less "self-selected" were needed to meet a 10 minute task. It might be worthwhile to look at these kinds of results to better understand the nature of our ALES tasks.

Just saying'

Happy Landings,

Don

Originally Posted by dharban

Some interesting numbers from the recent FAI F5J UK Championship. Of course, F5J allows competitors to set their own launch heights subject to a modest starting altitude penalty. Under that rule and in less than ideal conditions they flew 11 rounds, and put up 128 flights. 63 of those flights exceed 9 1/2 minutes with an average launch height of 165 meters.

Not suggesting anything at all about F5J. Just observing what launch altitudes more or less "self-selected" were needed to meet a 10 minute task. It might be worthwhile to look at these kinds of results to better understand the nature of our ALES tasks.

Just saying'

Happy Landings,

Don

Very interesting, Don. All sorts of observations ran through my mind as I read your post,the first being that they were pretty good pilots! I don't see 50% of flights from 200m being over 91/2 min in ALES competitions as yet.The second thought was that playing with the launch heights is possibly the best way to make it interesting.A lower launch height would also do away with the need for a high rate of climb. This would be good for beginners who may have less efficient planes.That is if we retained the 30 sec. motor run.I think this year in our monthly events I shall vary the launch heights.As most people have CAMs we would be limited to three choices of launch height,but we can still vary the target times as well. I realise these ideas are nothing new, as I see clubs already doing this very thing. I would like to here from the CD's of these events as to the feedback they may have had from contestants in those events?
How nice it is that we have a soaring competition that is so simple to run, and has so many on the spot variables available to the CD to use, to suit all weather conditions,and do not require high priced models, large fields, and minimum equipment and set up time.Let's go Fly!!!!. Ken.

Attached are the times and landing scores for the three events I have done the scoring for this year. These were all 10-minute rounds and it seems that in most circumstances 30% or more were getting close to the limit. Ten minute tasks has worked well for us since it allow us to fly four flight-groups every hour.

To get a sense of how fierce the competition was at CVRC, just note how many pilots were off by less than 10 seconds combined across all four flights.