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- Bravo Pierre
- The Elephant in the Corner
- Fly Offs and competitions in general
Bravo Pierre
From: Dave Edmonson
I love Pierre Chausseberg’s perfect solution to “STUPID D/T FLYOFFS”….NOT ALLOWED PER THE RULES! Changing the free flight event to a DT event is certainly stupid!
It is like having a chess competition and settling a draw by changing to checkers!
The Elephant in the Corner**
Editor’s Comment : For those who don’t know the DT flyoff, initially, I hear called a Bulgarian Flyoff has been around for a number of years and used in some European World Cup events. There was a plan to use it in a recent USA America’s Cup event but I do not think it happened. There are some people, like Dave above and Jim Leuken who think it is a crazy way to end a Free Flight event, maybe it is but that’s not the real issue. There are some others who want some way of ending an event with a winner so have seized upon it as way of doing so, unfortunately they should not have done so because as Pierre points out it is not in the Sporting Code.
Here is an example. I must point out that this is not intended to be a particular criticism of the events and people involved as this has happened before and some of the people were just acting on the precedent of earlier events. But we have just had an excellent example and can use data from that event rather than creating hypothetical data.
What has probably caused the issue to be raised is not that someone did not get a trophy but rather that it significantly changed the allocation of World Cup events. Recently there were two important World Cup events each with two events on the same weekend. In both cases the first day went off “normally”. But on the second day, the last day with people leaving to go home both events ran into difficulties in running a regular fly off. For the UK event it was not possible to fly a long fly off for any of the classes because of a high wind in the wrong direction. They ran a DT fly off. For the Hungarian event (held in Romania) the were able to do a first fly off and all events were decided except F1A because they ran out of daylight (there was a comment on Facebook that this was caused by a late start, but that is not relevant). This organizer strictly followed the sporting code and declared a tie for F1A and this allocates averaged world cup point to the 7 people that were tied with first place. They got 357 points each. The UK event has 6 people in the F1A DT fly off with points being allocated from 515 down to 200. Had the points been allocated using tie with averaging they will have got 319 each. The event in Romania had more participants so there was a higher allocation of bonus points. The net outcome was over this weekend the UK winner got 515 points and the tied winners got 357 points 158 points less because that organizer used a tie breaker not in the sporting code. Had both used the tie points method the Romanian tied winner would have got 38 more points each because of the greater bonus points. So one person got 158 more points because of the non-standard way the CD did a tie breaker. Last year in the F1A World Cup Winner, Per Findahl beat second place man Aviv Balassiano by only 43 points. By a strange coincidence the winner of the UK event placed third in the 2017 F1A World Cup by 150 points behind Per . In the 2018 F1C World cup the distance between 1 and 2 was only 7 points.
Note we could do a similar calculation for the sportsman who got the worst score in the DT fly off and he would have been better off if he was allocated the average score. What is important is that all events are score the same way.
We know that this is Free Flight and we don’t have control of the weather and sometimes the landowners and other factors but we do have control of the rules.
In another article in this chain Tapio suggested the sporting code could be changed to give every tied person the first place scores. This is not a good idea because it would put the Contest Director open to pressure from the participants to declare a tie at the slightest pretext.
** English idiom meaning the important fact that is very obvious but no one is talking about
Fly Offs and competitions in general
From:Leslie Farkas
I agree with Pierre’s comments. However the problem is that, it is not enough to say:”Read the book and stick to the rules” With CIAM and the FF S/C which are the governing body of our sport, they must address problems with authority. We just can not assume that everybody will follow the rules as written, and allow organizers to do whatever they want. This been going on for too long. If there are serious deviations, there must be consequences for the federations or individuals involved. To organize and run a competition is not a favour or a right but an honour. Our sport needs a strong leadership which acts like IOC, FIFA or IAAF who oversees the sports and deals with issues which may be contrary to the spirit of the sport. If we want Aeromodeling to be recognized as a sport, we must run our competitions and organization accordingly. .
Leslie