Dave,

It is not that hard. I set a deadline based on recommendations by MULTIPLE previous ED's. I chose to move this deadline closer to the actual event. While Tony and others want the deadlines moved closer they are not the ones who have to deal with any headaches put in place. Everything in life has deadlines, I don't see why this is any different. Many other NATS events have deadlines, and the ones that don't are usually events that only require timing and things where they do not use contestant judging or have to put together flight orders. In the future, maybe we can look at moving it to one week out. I chose to do it this way as based on the information I was given this was the best move. Future ED's can do anything they want, but I chose to do it this way, and still find it hard to believe that 2 weeks out you don't know if you are going to the NATS. Tony's story above is an obvious exception, but had the woman at the AMA officially said no on July 5, this does not happen. What created the problem was that the person at the AMA accepted the registration after the deadline. This year, that will not happen and that goes for ALL events with late deadlines. This was backed up by the competition people at the NATS planning meeting.

We put a man on the moon by people who were paid a good deal of money to get it done. This event is run by volunteers and while these volunteers are given some monies to help, it doesn't come anywhere near the amount to cover the trip to Muncie. This is all done on the volunteers own time and I have put many hours into this already. I really do not want to be up til 4am the night of the event trying to put together judging matrix's and flight orders so that at 8am that morning people like Tony can complain that they weren't given the flight orders earlier.

Arch