2022 Racing Rules

Hi – I’m Lee Harrison, I fly only regional competitions in the sports class and am mediocre at that, so I reviewed these rule changes, none really affect me much. But I do have the sense that sailplane racing is drifting toward increasing exclusivity; that it is getting harder and harder to make the transition into competition even at the regional level, and that is not good for the sport. Some of the issues are not intrinsically in the rules, but rather what he CD and the committee chose; but the practices seem to be drifting toward greater barriers to entry too.

My concerns looking forward

1. In the handicapped classes it is absolutely obvious that the best pilots in these classes are flying very high performance gliders, often the highest-performance gliders allowed in the class. This is a clear demonstration that the handicapping isn’t working. Independent of the speed handicapping, the plain fact of the matter is that performance always increases your chances of completing the task. This is not reasonably compensated for in the scoring system.

2. Motor gliders are becoming the norm; true sailplanes look like “yesteryear.” To date the motorgliders have competed on a “same as” basis with true sailplanes in part just by consent, and in part because motorglider air-start reliability has been so bad that it has restrained motorglider pilots from taking terrain/route risks that sailplane pilots would sensibly refuse. But the battery-sustainer sailplanes are changing the game, and at the places I fly they now have a truly unfair advantage. They don’t worry about what any sane sailplane pilot sees as the major safety decision(s) one routinely makes.

3. FLARM leeching, and leeching more generally (but FLARM leeching in particular) is basically destroying my sense that this is actually a contest of soaring skill. I don’t know whether I could learn to be a better leech or not; it’s simply not what I come to a soaring contest to do. I do understand the safety impetus for FLARM, but in my view it is destroying the competition. There are solutions, but they require changes in FLARM data & display algorithms for competition. If FLARMS had a “contest mode” that would provide no information about sailplanes farther than 2 km away that would solve a lot of it.

Lacking that then I think contest pilots should have the option to turn off their flarm except

* while in a generous radius of the starting or finish areas

* within the Turn cylinder radius or something like 4 miles of a smaller turnpoint

I’ve been flying sailplanes since 1969, had my CFI-G since 1971. You may consider me “an old coot behind the times,” but safety is not being improved by giving pilots ever more things to stare at on their panels. In this regard FLARM display (as opposed to FLARM audio warnings) does not appear to me to be a plus in the starting area. I am getting tired of thermalling with other gliders close enough that I can see into their cockpits, and seeing that they are thermalling looking at their instruments.