How to dissolve gliding competition gaggles
Home
Youtube-Channel
About
Shop
How to dissolve competition gaggles
Over the last decades there have been attempts made to reduce the size and frequency of gaggles at competitions. It is a question of safety and to some degree fairness. Most attempts have failed, more or less. This is an analytic way, from a competition pilot, how to actually solve it.
The reason competition pilots fly in gaggles is because it is beneficial with the current competition rules. Tactical sporting risk does not pay off. To reduce tactical risk the best way it to start, and fly, with the others.
The points-system have been constructed in a way so that "luck" should play as little role as possible in the result. This have the side effect that tactical risk with the goal of beating the others does not pay off. For tactical risk-taking to pay off it would be necessary for a daily win to compensate for an early out-landing. But that is not the case, you require several daily wins to compensate for one oulanding.
A bit about statistical chanse. If you flip a coin you have 50% chance that it land one side, or the other up. If you gain one point when you win this game and lose one point when you loose you will eventually make a gain of +-1 point. In the same game if you won 2 points when winning and only lost 1 point when loosing, you would in the long term gain from this game. The same is true of the opposite: If you would lose 2 point and only gain 1, you will lose points in the long term.
Only one way to go here
In gliding we often face the 50-50 challange: should I go the left or the right track? Start now or later?
In our game we will constantly loose since the loss of points is greater than gain of points if we choose the wrong one. Our points system is based on relative performance( the points difference between average and winner is less than average and first outlander) so the winning choice here is to do what the others do, tactically. You win by focusing on efficent flying technique and flying the best glider, generally not by bold tactical choices.
Understanding the statistical chance and development over time from this gain/loss imbalance we can look at our current rules and adjust this.
We want to increase the gain, and minimise the loss, in the 50-50 chance situation. It must be beneficial to take tactical sporting risk before we can see gaggles dissolve.
To increase the gain from a daily win we can scew the points-system where the average pilot gets 1000p and the winner gets relative with how much speed she/he beat the other with. For example: If the average speed of all the finishers was 100kmh, the pilot who finished with 100kmh would get 1000p. The pilot who finished with 110kmh would get 1000p*(coeff)*(110/100). The coefficient size needs to be carefully calculated from statistics.
To reduce the loss we can introduce the option of neutralising the worst scoring day. For example, for every 4 valid competition days every pilot will have their worst day normalised to the daily average points. For example: if using the above proposed points-system where 1000p is given for the average speed of the day, the pilot will have their points increased to 1000p if it was lower.
Another way(and possibly simpler) is to move the scoring system to accumulating daily placing system, much like SGP is today. Only change is that we give points to all pilots in the upper 2/3 of the results. If there is 30 pilots in the competition only the first 20 will have points. Daily winner gets 20, daily second gets 19 etc. The lower 1/3 gets nothing. By not giving everyone points we have effectifly adjusted the win/lose ratio in the 50/50 chanse to be beneficial for tactical risk taking.
The daily scoring system also have the benefit of not showing minute performance difference between gliders. While an exceptionally well tuned glider might gain 5-10p per day in our current scoring system, this will not show up as clear in the result by using the daily placing system.
Changing scoring system may feel like a big step but in reality we need to understand that what we are doing is just a game. Safety is our most important priority.
7-march-2026
Support me
I build and maintain this site to help you. I do it in my spare time and it's not free.
I DON'T WANT ADVERTISEMENT on this site. Help me to help you:
Buy me a beer!
© 2018 Niklas Löfgren
|