SEN 3243
- Sporting Code
- 21 st Century
- Allard was right
Sporting Code
There is a fairly recent release of the sporting code and I noticed a question on the FB from someone looking for the F1Q rules and not being able to find them. I must admit that I did look for them using my phone, I found them but the display did not display the URL very clearly. I had wanted to post the URL on the FB. So being a geezer I went home, got my device with a keyboard and found the Sporting Code at
https://fai.org/page/ciam-code
https://www.fai.org/sites/default/files/sc4_vol_f1_freeflight_24_v2.pdf
FAI sportsmen should check this from time to time. I went to the said FB again and did notice a picture from the EC of a sportsman on the flight line with his shiny slinky new black F1B with no numbers or National identifier on the wing. I must check my Sporting Code to verify that it is needed, especially at a category one event.
21 st Century
I thought that I would tell people that it indeed the 21 Century. I thought that everyone was aware. I was gob smacked not to see official online reporting of the score from the Euro Champs online. We now have plenty of modern communications devices, options, and services where news can be reported from most places. In fact most of us complain about too much news. Again from watching the FB we saw many unhappy people from all around the world wanting to know what was happening at te Euro Champs . Even in the 21st century we can’t always get to every model flying event we want but we still want to know what’s going on and of course those there need to know that and in addition get the latest instructions from the contest director. There are tools such as Google Sheets that make it very easy to put a spread sheet online. This is what your kids or grand kids can do. And for those not so blessed not all that far from the site of that event is the it company wings.rs that already put lots of events online and has offered to help event organizers put results in the cloud. There are good things in the 21st century, even some technology that helps us promote our events. Take advantage of it.
BTW I have seen on the FB snide comment about Romanian telecom’s internet coverage of the flight site. Some people seemed to be able to post ok but not all. In the case of Google Sheets and posting the results. It would always be possible to put the results on a USB drive and bicycle to a place where the internet was good enough to upload the results at least a couple of times a day. I suggested a bicycle because I noted that while the Euro Champs had generally good weather there was some bad weather that caused the 20th century transportation to get stuck.
In a recent FB rant by a well known sportsman he pointed out that people pay a lot of money to take part in World Cup events and travel quite some distance and organizers charge entry fees. A reason why is to pay is for this stuff. We expect top flyers at these Category 1 and World Cup events and the participants try very hard the organizers need to reciprocate. We know it takes people to run the events, we have done it before , so we know how many.
Allard was right
At the Euro champs a number of people, on the field or not tried to fill the information gap in a number of ways. Their effort was appreciated. One person filmed various fly off events and put it online. Of course these collected a number of comments. One F1B flyoff got an observation from Allard who noted that some timekeepers were not looking the way the models were going and some did not have the prescribed equipment. And he commented on how hard it was to control that situation.
The next morning there were contradictory reports on the number of participants in the next level of fly off. With one person saying there were 4 clean and another that there were 6. It turns out that 2 more people were clean and this was determined by examination of their on board flight recorders aka altimeters. While timing errors are more likely in a long fly off compared with a regular round a 50% increase in the numbers clean is quite high.
As Allard, Frederic, Roger and more would say, isn’t about time we fixed this.
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Roger Morrell