The three possible outcomes of the argument over the 2009 King Mountain co-Nationals each tell a tale about our values as a community. Whichever outcome is chosen will have little to no effect on the NTSS ranking and the US National team, but it will have a lot to say about what we should think about the people involved in making the decision.

The first option is to provide the NTSS points as per the 2006 USHPA Competition Rulebook. That is follow the rules. This would value the meet at 7%.

The beauty of this option is that it follows the rules. It reaffirms the belief that you play by the rules, you get your reward accordingly. It says that arbitrary decisions are not part of the picture, that you can trust what is written down as the rules that everyone plays by.

The ugly side of this is that the meet organizer and the Competition Committee Chairman have screwed the pilots who flew in the King Mountain co-Nationals by not thinking clearly about what the implications were of using the local rules to determine the number of points available to the pilots. The pilots suffer because of their mistakes.

The second option is to score the meet using the OzGAP 2005 program as we do for all the other USHPA sanctioned competitions. You can see my calculations here: http://ozreport.com/13.171#5 and some discussion here: http://ozreport.com/13.171#7. These calculations would have valued the meet at 60%, almost 10 times higher.

While this is likely to be close to a fair valuation for the meet given the conditions and pilot skills, it was done after the fact, which makes it suspect. It is also not done according to the rules (as there are no rules which allow for this or provide any guidance about how to do this), and there is no basis for it other than as an attempt to be fair (after the fact) to the pilots.

One can see people voting for this option in an attempt to be fair, but undermining the rule of law at the same time. This sends the message that things can be changed even after the fact, even when you thought that you were playing by the rules.

Apparently, the third option is to arbitrarily give the meet 100% validity based on faulty and ignorant reasoning. Just because a meet has five days of flying does not mean it is worth 100% validity (as argued by the Competition Committee Chairman). We have a very recent example of this in the 2009 East Coast Championship with 73% validity and five days of flying. Are we going to go back and give that meet 100% validity?

Seven Competition Committee members voted for this third option. Competition Committee members have admitted that they know little to nothing about competition (they were put on the member list when they attended one meeting - a holdover from previous competition committee fights), but voted for this option. Are they voting this way only because this is what the Competition Committee Chairman has proposed? Is this political in the worst sense of the word?

The USHPA BOD members will have to decide which way to go on this matter at the Fall BOD meeting, and their decision will have a lot to say about their values. I don't feel that the outcome will have any substantial effect on the NTSS ranking or the US National team selection, so as far as that is concerned, I am agnostic as to which option is chosen.