Hi All,
There's some hang gliding stuff and a whole lot more from Florida at:
http://www.terrypryan.com/BlogTR.htm

If you've got too much time on your hands, check it out.
Cheers!
Terry from Toronto

I reposted an entry from the Oz Report last week (http://events.dowsett.ca/node/1309) on what he calls 'grade inflation'. I meant to but didn't take the time to post my take on his posting. I heard that same comment used today at the Flytec Championships and knew they were refering to the same opinion.

The first thing you need to keep in mind is that we are trying to ensure that the efforts pilots put into flying the tasks they are told to fly in a competition are rewarded fairly. We aren't trying to make every day 1000 points as weather and flying conditions have help adjust days where we aren't flying in ideal conditions.

Sorry for the lack of blog entries. Things always get crazy at the event. I really do need to make a point of posting more.

We were faced with bad weather all week - they had WEEKS of awesome flying weather prior to us coming and we thought we had it made weather-wise. Most of southern Florida was caught right in the middle of a High and a Low that just wouldn't move and we had high winds all week (20-30 knots) and it was rather gusty so the towing conditions were less than ideal let along sending competitors on their way.

We ended up adding another day on to the end of the meet (Friday) with the FAI's approval as everyone wanted to do as much as they could to save the meet from being invalid (since we need two days for a CIVL Cat 2 event). We still had a bit of high winds on Friday but they were low enough to have another task to save the meet. So it ended on a high note with 18 out of the 41 pilots in goal.

From the The Oz Report:

Every day is worth at least almost 1,000 points, no matter what.

The GAP parameters for competitions have been set so low that every day is as "valid" as the next day. Here's how the authors of the GAP scoring program explain how to set the GAP parameters (really the only one that is contentious is the distance parameter which is tied to the fastest time to goal time parameter by the projected fastest pilot's speed):

NominalDistance: the minimum task distance that should be worth 1000 points.

(In the Alps, for hang gliding competition is suggested 50-70 km, for paragliding 30-50 km). If a task distance is less than NominalDistance, the day will be probably devalued. There is no penalty for a task that is longer than NominalDistance as long as the task results in an even distribution of the pilots along the course. There would also be no penalty if the NominalDistance parameter was set shorter, as long as it would take a reasonable length of time for the pilots to fly this distance. What constitutes a "reasonable length of time" is explained further down the page.

From the The Oz Report:

Start before the first start time and your flight duration gets shifted to the first start time

As we have done in numerous US meets and again recently at the Bogong Cup, we allowed pilots to cross the start circle line first without additional penalty other than the shift of their flight forward to the first start time. We feel that this is penalty enough.

Sometimes this is hard to do, especially with GAP 2003 as this requires manual work on the part of the scorekeeper. One way we've gotten around this is to have the start window open a half hour after the launch window, but with no fifteen or twenty minute time intervals imposed until one hour after the first launch time.

11AM update: low cloud base, light lift, light winds = no task for today. 50% chance of rain tomorrow AM so we are hoping for a second task Sunday afternoon.

10AM
A little cloudy this morning. A bit of rain overnight. I haven't seen the forecast yet though but it does seem to be clearing and the winds seem a bit lighter than yesterday morning.

It was rather windy here for our first task on Saturday. The winds were forecasted to be 15mph on the ground and 25-30mph up higher. They were pretty accurate and James Tindle, the owner of The Florida Ridge and also our Safety Director was monitoring conditions closely. He reported prior to the day that the safety flags would go up when the winds reached 18mph and with gusts of another 4mph. We were hitting that at times and he felt it was borderline at times.

All pilots flew at least once and quite a few had multiple tows which is common when the winds are this strong - broken weak links, getting knocked off of tow low or not being able to hook a decent thermal brings the pilots back down quicker than on ligher wind days. We also had a number of weaklink breaks with the tugs as they were trying a little to hard to land on the tug start line and ended up wrapping the town line around fences. This caused a few delays in the tow lines but rather minor.

We got thru the initial pilot meeting tonight - pretty relaxed and easy going. We've got about 45 pilots registered.

It's fun having all these Canadians down here and we've taken over the protest committee with all four Canadians filling those spots.

We are allowing pilots to jump the start gates which brought out some contreversy but it should work just fine. If you jump the start gate your time gets shifted back to the first start time which means you will not get credit for any leading bonus along the way and disadvantage you if you finish even on par with other finishers that take proper start times.

From the The Oz Report:

$1,000 for flex wing record

Thu, Apr 6 2006, 9:58:29 pm EDT
James Tindle offers $1,000 for a record flight from the Florida Ridge tomorrow.

The Florida state flex wing record is 208 miles from Quest Air. It's $200 for the longest flex wing flight tomorrow, and $1,000 if you go further than Kevin did.