Thoughts on the Logan 15m Nationals

A few days after the Logan Nationals were over, I had a chance to write down some thoughts about how I thought contest organizations are supposed to work in general, and the contest organization at Logan in particular.  At about the same time, Mike Shakman (SH) cc’d me on a very cogent and insightful letter he had written to the SSA Competition Committee regarding the same contest.   In the interest of promoting a full and open discussion about the roles and  responsibilities of contest organization staffers, I have included my thoughts and Mike Shakman’s letters below.  I would urge all who read this to talk to their fellow pilots and to your SSA representatives about what happened at Logan, and how we can better prepare our new crop of  post-Spratt CD’s to avoid those pitfalls in the future.  I have not ever been a CD, nor do I want to be one – it is clearly the hardest job in contest soaring, bar none.  However, I acknowledge that that is probably how every contest pilot feels, and many have taken on the job in spite of that.  Maybe someday I’ll be put into the CD barrel, too.  If so, I hope I have learned enough about the right and wrong way of doing things that I won’t screw up too badly ;-).

DISCLAIMER:  As anyone with a brain should know, these are my (and Mike’s) thoughts only, and have no official standing in any way.  Moreover, I asked Bill Elliott and Rand Baldwin (owners/operators of the Soaring Cafe) if they would mind me posting such potentially  inflammatory material on their site.  After a few seconds of deliberation, they both said “go for it” ;-).

 

——–  My email to John Cochran (BB)  ———-

John,

I’m an engineer, and I can’t help trying to figure out how things work, or don’t work, and what underlying rules/laws govern system behavior.  I suspect economists have the same problem ;-).
When I look at soaring contests as a system, I see three major interacting factors (sub-systems in engineer-speak):
  • Contest Management
  • Task Calling
  • Facilities or lack thereof
A good contest combines excellent contest management (registration, retrieve desk, social activities, launch operations, etc) with excellent task-calling (task advisory committee, weather forecasting, CD skills, etc) and good facilities (camping, trailer parking, porta-potties, hotels, etc).  A not-so-good contest falls down on one or more of these aspects.  Falling down on facilities makes for an unpleasant, but not necessarily unsafe contest.  Falling down on Task Calling can have disastrous consequences as we discovered last year at Uvalde, or more lately (IMHO) in Logan.  Falling down on Contest Management can result in long launches due to too few towplanes, or (as was the case in Logan) a retrieve desk that goes missing in action.
Logan was my 9th contest of the year, and it was by far the worst in terms of task calling and contest management.  It was actually pretty good in terms of facilities, except for the friction between the glider activities and the Utah Jet Center FBO and the lack of Porta-Potties on the grid.  Contest management sucked, especially with respect to retrieve management (as you found on that first day when a pilot was unaccounted for and nobody cared)
Good task calling takes several factors into account:
  • Local knowledge of the terrain and how it affects soaring conditions
  • Weather forecasts and the range of possibilities for soaring conditions
  • A range of task options that can be employed to address changes in soaring conditions as the day develops prior to gate-opening time.
  • An honest safety assessment of the task, looking for possibilities for ‘stupid pilot tricks’ (IMHO a lack of a trivial safety review led to the broken glider on Day1).  On this subject, I think it is time the SSA and the soaring community acknowledge the overwhelming evidence that contest pilots in general will do unsafe things to gain a few more points.
  • A set of pre-agreed parameters to be used for deciding which of the available tasks should be used.  This last factor is especially important for technical sites like Logan, where a small change in the weather (for instance, thermal height) can have a disproportionally large effect on the feasibility and/or safety of one or more of the task options.
On Day 1, the weather forecast clearly indicated the potential for blow-ups, a significant blow-up was clearly visible in the first turn area at gate-opening time, and the gate was opened anyway, resulting in mass landouts and the first of two broken gliders.  Several pilots (including myself) deliberately flew into an active thunderstorm to get into the first turn area, and the pilot of the broken glider continued flying into rising terrain into the lee side of a mountain in an attempt to get into the second turn area circle.  The position, size, and movement of the storm would have been clearly evident on a current radar plot, but this wasn’t  done (or even thought of as far as I can tell).  The CD could and should have cancelled the task for the 15m nationals fleet and advised everyone to land safely wherever they could. This fiasco set the tone for task calling for the rest of the contest.
On a subsequent day, the Task B and C options were the same as Task A, except with lower minimum times. However, the minimum distance for the physical task was so high that the B and C tasks were essentially identical to Task A.  When the weather didn’t develop as expected, the CD was left with no options.  Fortunately the CD and the task advisory committee scrambled to put together a new task when this was pointed out to them.  Clearly the CD never reviewed the original task for practicality in the face of weaker weather.
The second and third mass-landout days were similar in that the tasks didn’t match the actual weather – they were constructed based on hoped-for weather, rather than what actually happened, and there was typically no backup plan, and no pre-agreed set of go/no-go parameters. On the third mass-landout day, the top of climb at Logan was just barely 10,000msl, and it was clear that overdevelopment was occurring where none had been forecast.  The task was into the Bear Lake and Afton valleys, which was going to be difficult at best going in, and very difficult getting out.  Our top of climb was about 2000 less than what even Tim Taylor considered comfortable for east-oriented tasking.  The day was clearly not going as well as anticipated, but we were all forced to go anyway.  I heard the following pre-start conversation on the radio:
CD: “98 (Pete Alexander), this is the CD – do you think this task is reasonable and safe?”
TT (before Pete had a chance to say anything):  “TT is positive”.
Note here that Peter was essentially bullied into submission by Tim, and the CD (Tim McAllister) let it happen.  Later that same day, while both Peter and I were sitting at the Afton airport waiting for our 3-state retrieves, I had the opportunity to ask Peter about this.  He told me that he had argued strenuously in the task meeting for a less ambitious task, pointing out that there were significant indications of weaker-than-hoped-for conditions and over-development in the weather forecasts. He was voted down by Tim who was adamant that we were going to the Grand Tetons.  As it turned out, TT was one of the few people who made it back that day, due to a very low save over dubious (note that I didn’t say the ‘U’ word) terrain.  If TT had not been one of the 4 pilots who made it around this day, or the task had been changed to something more in line with the weather, he probably would not have won the contest.
The last contest day was an interesting contrast in that the task committee and CD seemed to finally get their act together.  The task sheet had multiple task options (not just one task with multiple times), and (as Peter told me on the grid prior to launch) there was a set of pre-agreed parameters to be used to decide which task should be used.  The weather didn’t develop quite as planned (big surprise), so the CD decided to use  3000′ agl tows instead of 2500′ to give our fully ballasted gliders a better chance to climb.  In addition, Pete Alexander refused to let himself be bullied by TT, and convinced the CD to switch from a clearly improbable Task A (over U——— terrain to the southeast) to a more conservative (but still challenging) Task B to Afton, and reduce the min time to 2.75 hours vs 3.
I think that a lot of what happened this year at Logan was a combination of factors:  The weather was generally weaker than anticipated which made many of the traditional Logan tasks significantly more challenging, especially for pilots not intimately familiar with the soaring area (i.e. everyone not named TT), there was a very strong-willed individual on the task committee who was bound and determined to showcase Logan regardless of the cost in damaged gliders and/or pilots, and (until the very last day) neither CD was willing/able to set reasonable task go/no-go guidelines and then stick to them.
At a regional contest in a non-technical site, all the above would be more amusing than terrifying, but at Logan it was definitely of the “please God let me survive this” variety, and the number of withdrawals not due to damage or injury showed it.  IMHO the Logan 15m nationals was NOT a good venue for selecting a 15m champion, and WAS another nail in the coffin of participation by Joe glider pilot.  Instead of showcasing Logan as an exciting and challenging place to fly (it certainly was that!), I think it became regarded as a place where 60 gliders and 5 tow planes all occupy the same small stretch of foothills trying desperately to stay in itsy-bitsy thermals, followed by running ridges with lots of blind corners, followed by flying off to Wyoming never to return ;-).
Bill Hill (Z), an accomplished mountain pilot from Moriarty, withdrew from the regionals after Day 1 citing the obvious safety hazard of having all those gliders and towplanes in the same small stretch of airspace before the start.  Both Mike Shakman and Jim Garrison withdrew citing physical exhaustion and the feeling that they were in over their heads at Logan.  By the time the contest ended, over 1/3 of the field had withdrawn, only one of which was due to glider damage.
Anyway, the totality of this experience has convinced me that the training  resources available to prospective CD’s is a bit thin, especially when it comes to the dynamics of task calling.  I note that this problem is very similar to the one faced by the airlines many years ago where a rash of fatal crashes were traced back to strong-willed captains cutting off timely and vital information from their co-pilots.  The airlines, to their credit, responded by training all their crews in ‘crew resource management’ (CRM) to facilitate the free(er) flow of information.  IMHO, a major factor in the Logan fiasco was the CD’s non-recognition and/or inability to manage the ‘crew resource’ problem of a strong-willed individual in the task committee cutting off vital and timely information from other members.
Regards,
Frank

——–  My email to John Cochran (BB)  ———-

 

Attached as a PDF is Mike’s original document, and below is some additional information provided by Mike as a follow-up to a response from John Cochrane

080211_Shakman_letter

 

——–  Mike’s response to a reply from John Cochrane ———-

Thanks for taking the time to read and respond to my letter. At the risk of expanding and complicating the discussion further, I would offer the following:1.  Site selection is a tough issue where there are no competing bids and its not easy to get qualified people to run the contest.  I have no easy answer to those problems.  But it seems pretty clear that picking sites that don’t seem safe to a significant number of the contestants is not going to advance contest flying.  The issue is not limited to the site alone.Site selection, advanced preparation and tasking are closely related in terms of generating a safe feeling about a site.  In my club flying in the French Alps there were extensive briefings on transition routes and landout options, a published book of landable fields with GPS coordinates, and gradual acclimation to the areas to be flown.  That did not avoid all incidents, but made most pilots comfortable.  While not all of that can be accomplished for a single contest at a site like Logan, it may provide some ideas.  The key may be to identify the need for special treatment as part of the site sanctioning process and to ask the organizers to agree to a pre-contest process to alert pilots to the issues and provide as much of the necessary information in advance as possible.

Tasking is a whole topic to itself, as is the relationship between the CD and the advisors, and the sensitivity of the CD and the advisors to the comfort level of most contestants.  I hope Frank Paynter will share with you his email on these subjects related to Logan.  I’m copying Frank to ask him if he would do that, since he has some useful data on how bad decisions can get made.   A more explicit set of guidelines for the role of the advisors and the CD in task setting, the need for alternative tasks, and post-start review of unexpected weather conditions in difficult circumstances might all be part of addressing these issues.  I don’t think these are primarily rules issues.  They would seem to be part of some sort of guidelines for contest organizers.

2.  Cancelling a contest day is a big deal, and is probably guaranteed to make a part of the contestant population (those who took chances and got around) very angry.  As everyone know who participates in enough contests, however, many contestants will do really stupid and dangerous things for the points that they may get.  A rule that assures a review of the day if many do not complete the task could encourage pilots to feel that if it seems dangerous because of thunderstorms or something else, the day may not count.  Therefore, the contestant should may choose not to take the risks that are involved in trying to complete the task.  The safety issue, of course, is independent of the fairness issue, which is a wholly separate reason to address unexpected or dangerous weather situations.  The loss of speed points that result solely from where you were when the T-storms sweep the task area, or what level of risks you were prepared to take in racing a storm to a turnpoint, do not encourage a sense that the contest is fair.

3.  Freedom of speech is not a topic that I can recall every coming up before in the SSA context.  Maybe it did, but I wasn’t aware of it.  The takeaway from the Logan experience is that most members who follow contests (perhaps that’s only the seeded pilots and a few others) will probably conclude that Frank was censored because he was critical of the task calling.  The official SSA response that the issue of contest reporting is up to the contest organizers won’t change that impression or make it seem fair.  The incident leaves a bad taste and will likely be remembered about the contest for a lot longer than who won or what the weather was like.  That is not a good outcome for Logan organizers, for the SSA or for encouraging contest participation.  My view on the better policy is in my letter.  Whatever the answer, there should be an official SSA policy so everyone knows the rules that apply.Thanks,Mike Shakman

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