What constitutes an FAI flyer.

[Grow Pattern]

Hi Earl,
             I can really relate what you said and in particular your last comment, "Concerns really revolve around staying within one's "comfort level" or reaching out for a challenge with a chance of improvement - be it a pilot or a judge".

On one hand many of my pattern colleagues, myself included, can really fly certain maneuvers with great comfort, on the other hand there are maneuvers that we fly where we have no comfort at all. Some are almost a crash in the offing.

An example for me is a an 8-point roll. I just love doing them. Then they asked me to do it from inverted to inverted. Can you spell increased pucker factor. A second example is judging, I prefer to judge a schedule that I have flown or attempted to fly. It helps me know what is coming next and how much time I have to put a score together. Unknowns I find very hard to get the timing and hence judge.

Which leads me to the issue unknown schedules for the majority of us. When I flew in a couple of IMAC Nat's I figured out what was the big difference between Scale and Precision aerobatics, (At least for me). The words "practiced aerobatics" came up. IMAC only gets a year to fly their known routines and they do have unknown schedules like their full scale counterparts. BTW, It could well be said that when I flew in their first Nat's ALL of the schedules were unknowns to me :-)

When we fly our schedules we practice and practice them to the n'th degree. We get comfortable but it does not take much to throw us off our rhythm. How many times have you heard "I have only flown the routine left to right etc?". I think that this comfort-zone that we create with practice is why we often see so much resistance to the change of the schedules, or at least the content of the new schedules. I have witnessed pretty good pilots try a new schedule and be terrible. Then a week later they have it memorized and they can do a very respectable rendition.

This is why I think that unknowns are not such a good idea for pattern because they undermine the premise of practiced schedules and the comfort that come with that practice.

Regards,

Eric.

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