I think you're the exception rather than the rule. Going from Intermediate to Advanced, a pilot has to learn how to do (with precision) a slow roll, 4-point roll, 2 maneuvers with snaps, and a spin. That's a lot to take on for most, but not all. Brett Wickizer went straight from Advanced to FAI and, if memory serves me correctly, made the Finals at the Nats in FAI in his first year. I'm quite confident that Brett's the exception. When schedules are being designed, they have to be designed around the norm, not the exception. As a Masters pilot who attends quite a few contests, I do a considerable amount of judging of all the classes other than Masters. From that experience and from watching those pilots progress over a few seasons, I think the previous sequence committee designers got it right. And that's looking at the whole package, Sportsman to Intermediate, Intermediate to Advanced, Advanced to Masters, and Masters to FAI.

I currently serve on both the AMA Contest Board and the current Sequence Committee. I wasn't on the previous Sequence Committee and only hope the one I sit on now has done as good a job as the previous one. If there's one thing I know from experience, it's that most competitors look at a new (or existing) schedule from their own personal frame of reference or skill set if you prefer. When you're tasked with the responsibility of designing schedules or making rules, you have to step outside of yourself and look at the interconnection from bottom to top. If you don't, you'll start dying from the bottom and that was happening just a few years ago. What I'm seeing now is a healthy influx of pilots coming in that currently reside primarily in the Sportsman and Intermediate classes with a few pilots ready to move up at this point. That tells me the previous Sequence Committee got it right and I can only hope we match their performance.

Related to all of this is the Annex system which effectively turns over the design, approval, and publication of all future schedules to the Special Interest Group (SIG) for Precision Aerobatics which is the NSRCA. As a member of the AMA Contest Board, I voted for this with significant reservation and I know at least some of the other Contest Board Members shared my reservations. My concerns go back to what I said about competitors viewing current or future schedules from their own frame of reference. What I've seen is Intermediate pilots that start getting bored with their schedules but don't want to go to Advanced for any number of reasons such as fear of inability to learn the maneuvers, entering a class at the bottom of the food chain, or whatever. They show up right here calling for Intermediate to be made harder, totally ignoring the guy coming up from Sportsman who's going to be significantly challenged. I see the same thing in Advanced where a pilot(s) starts getting bored with their schedules but don't want to go to Masters for any number of reasons, totally ignoring the guy coming up from Intermediate who's going to be significantly challenged. I'm starting to see it in Masters now too with a few pilots calling for integrated rolling maneuvers and so on, totally ignoring the guy coming up from Advanced who's going to be significantly challenged.

My concern is that if future Sequence Committee Members aren't careful with keeping a broad, overall view of ALL the classes and how they interconnect, Precision Aerobatics could be significantly damaged from the bottom up and it'll take years to fix it. That was my primary reservation in AMA handing over the responsibility to the NSRCA.

Verne Koester