Mike Haley, the USHPA Competition Committee Chairman wrote a few days ago (paraphrased here) that because there were five days of flying at King it was 100% valid.

Mike Haley apparently does not understand how meet validity is actually determined. At least, he didn't when he wrote this. The number of flying days is only one part of the determination of validity.

I have "rescored" the King Mountain co-Nationals, not to change the outcome, but to determine the validity of the competition in a manner that is compatible with the rest of the USHPA sanctioned competitions and using the approved USHPA Competition Rulebook method.  My motivation was that I wanted to be fair to the King Mountain pilots and all the other pilots in the NTSS system also.

I have rescored it using the OzGAP 2005 in a manner that is I believe valid and doesn't require that the pilots know anything in advance about the scoring system used.

The King Mountain meet is a cross country open distance meet. The pilot who wins the day is the pilot who goes the furthest on that day. Any scoring system would make that person the day's winner. And all the other pilots would be ranked based on how far they went in any scoring system.

The pilots' motivation on every day is to go the furthest that they can on that day and to go longer than all the other pilots. The scoring system is irrelevant when it comes to this motivation. No matter which scoring system is used, the pilot has the same motivation to go the furthest.

BTW, this is also true (for the most part) for Race to Goal. The pilot who gets to goal the earliest and fastest wins the day, under GAP (although there is obviously an advantage from going early if you get to goal and go reasonably fast).

My "rescoring" is meant to determine the validity of the King Mountain co-Nationals. I believe that it is quite valid to do this after the fact.  In fact, the way the original scores were done would have only garnered the winner twenty three points. The Competition Committee should have foreseen the need to come up with a method ahead of time. So now we need to do (and are forced to do) the best, most accurate and fair job we can.

The validity is determined by basically two factors. How far each pilot flew and whether they launched or not. Distance validity and launch validity.

No matter what scoring system was used, the pilots were motivated to launch and to fly as far as possible in an open distance competition. Otherwise they would not score well.

The Big Spring US Nationals used the following GAP parameters: Nominal Distance - 80 km (49.7 miles), Minimum distance - 5 km (3.1 miles), Nominal time - 2 hours, Nominal at goal - 25%. The idea was to call tasks between two hours and three hours to get to goal, that the top pilots fly on average 40 km/h (ignoring wind) and therefore should be able to fly 80 km in two hours, and any task shorter than that should be devalued. David Glover and I figured that given that Big Spring was a western site with high cloud bases and moderate to strong lift that going 50 miles (not counting the wind) for a task was a reasonable task. We later felt that we should have set the Nominal Distance to 140 km, as we felt that tasks shorter than that should have been devalued more than they were.

The average distance flown can be quite a bit less than the Nominal Distance and you still obtain 100% distance validity. The average distance flown can be about 30 miles and you still get 100% distance validity with Nominal Distance set to 80 km. If the average distance flown was less than 30 miles that seemed to us to be a day that should be devalued.

To do the "rescoring" for the King meet I used the following GAP parameters: Nominal Distance - 80 km (49.7 miles), Minimum distance - 5 km (3.1 miles), Nominal time - 2 hours, Nominal at goal - 1%. The minimum distance at King was 1 mile (to the bomb out LZ), but to make the King meet comparable with other USHPA sanctioned competitions I upped the minimum distance to that used at Big Spring. This means that I inflated the distances given to pilots who bombed out at King thereby upping the validity of the meet a small amount.

I set the goal percent at 1% instead of 25%. This puts almost all the validity on the distance flown which seems right given that this was an open distance meet.

I set the Nominal Distance at 80 km for a number of reasons:

1) King is an Open Distance meet. The pilots have all day to go as far as possible. There is no goal to limit how far that they can go, unlike at Big Spring. Therefore in general we can expect pilots to go further in an open distance competition.

2) To eliminate or reduce any after the fact bias. I just use the value that was in place before the meet occurred (the one that was later used at Big Spring).

3) Big Spring and King are both western "big air" venues, not Florida or Maryland, so equivalent values should be used.

4) 80 km is equal to about 2 hours of flying. You would think that at a big air cross country open distance nationals you would expect the top pilots to be able to fly cross country for at least two hours to have a fully valid task. Anything less than that should be devalued.

5) 80 km = 50 miles. If the average pilot flew 30 miles the distance validity would be approximately 100% (this is an approximate rule). I would expect that if the average pilot flew less than 30 miles in a cross country nationals the day (or all days) should be devalued.

6) 40 km (the value used for the East Coast Championship) = 25 miles. If the average pilot has to fly about 18 miles to have a day be worth 100%.  Should we consider the conditions that we expect to find at King equal to those that we expect to find at Ridgely? I doubt it.

7) Bill Soderquist was quoted in the Oz Report yesterday stating:

As for mileage this year's King meet was one of the shortest on mileage that I have been to because of the weather conditions. We had several days that high overcast limited the mileage. We only had one day I was able to break 100 miles, but most days were 60 to 80 mile days often on a cross wind component.

He is saying that weather caused problems this year at King, and still he sees King as a big cross country location even with the weather, so that we would assume that the average pilot could do 30 miles.

If you have a cogent and logical argument that the Nominal Distance for the King Mountain co-Nationals should not be set to something less than 80 km, please let me know.

Given these parameters I went ahead and "rescored" the King Mountain co-Nationals using OzGAP2005 using the USHPA guidelines. Only three parts of the OzGAP 2005 equations are used to determine the validity of each task:

1) Launch validity.  How many of the pilots actually in the meet launched each day? I considered that there were 34 pilots, two being absent (ABS). If a pilot got a zero, according to Lisa's scoring, I gave them a DNF, unless I knew that they were injured or had left the meet (as per CIVL definitions) or never showed up for the meet.

2) Distance validity. The further pilots go, the higher the validity.

3) Open distance task max out at 900 points. This is a feature of the GAP scoring system. Open distance tasks, or situations where pilots don't make it to goal, are devalued by 10%. This was true for two days of the Big Spring Nationals, for example. All other days in USHPA sanctioned competition where pilots don't make goal (the task committee set too long a task) or where open distance tasks are called are devalued by 10%, so to do so for the King meet is consistent for evaluation of comparative validity purposes (which is my only purpose here).

If the King meet had had six days of normal distance flying then the meet would have been worth about 5400 points which is much higher than 3600, the threshold needed for 100% validity. Most USHPA sanctioned competitions go for seven days. By shortening the competition to six days, Lisa reduced the likelihood that King would be fully valid.

No other portions of the OzGAP 2005 equations were used in rescoring the competition. Only these three factors determined the validity of each day and the overall validity of the competition.

When I rescore the King meet, I get Bill Soderquist winning with 2166.2 points. 2166.2/3600 = 60% validity, not 100%.

I find that on the first and third days there was 100% distance validity. That on the second day it was 87%. On the last two days it was somewhat less than 40%. Because the pilots didn't fly very far, or bombed out, the meet validity was reduced.

Launch validity varied between 75% and 94%. This is a major factor in reducing the validity of the meet. Presumably because launch conditions were not conducive to safe launches the meet validity was reduced.

I have placed the King rescoring here. You are free to review my work and please provide any critique.