ORIGINAL: Mastertech
The result we've seen over the last 20 years, remember I was out of pattern for ten of those years coming back into it was a shock of major proportion, is the difficulty creep in the lower classes. This is directly attributable to FAI necessarily getting more difficult to keep those guys interested and weed out the also-rans from the guys who really can fly on the world stage. The rest rolled downhill right into ''Masters'' Heck Masters today is far harder than FAI was back then by a fair amount.
Killing off Expert was a mistake and disrupted the natural flow we had at the time. One can look at it two different ways I suppose.............
Tim
The FAI/CIAM put together F3A schedules with the sole purpose of picking a World's Champ. Has nothing to do with maintaining guys interest. The people who fly the top World class, have interest galore.
Adding Expert to AMA "might" divide Masters up a little, you may have a small point there. The logistics involved, from shcedule picking, to managing the events to filling the judge chairs, to me, is hardly worth the trouble.
But that's my opinion. YMMV