Chip,

It was a great event, I had a lot of fun. But I have to say, I felt deprived in the competition department. I *did not* like the shortened sportsman, at most you saved about 90 seconds per sportsman flight and you denied us the *least* repetitive part of the sequence (vertical upline, split-S turnaround, horizontal roll, the 2nd of 2 1/2 reverse cubans and the cobra). As someone who treked a couple hundred miles and shelled out for a hotel room to compete, not to mention the $40 to participate I felt denied the equal opportunity to participate. You had 8 folks show up for sportsman because you threw a fun bash. We had 3 in Sportsman at Victorville a few weeks before and we had 4 in Sacramento this past weekend. Please don't confuse correlation (we shortened the pattern and had 8 sportsman contestants) with causality (we had 8 sportsman contestants BECAUSE we shortened the pattern). I don't believe the latter is true. The guys that were in sportsman that I talked to would have liked to do the whole sequence. You had 8 because Arvin is centrally located and there was a bunch of other fun stuff built around the competition.

Let's please not have any more competitions that shorten the sequence, you are denying us the opportunity to perform in front of judges, which is what we need (other than lots of practice) to get better at managing our nerves and prepare ourselves to move up to intermediate. The only reason the sequence "feels" repetitive is because most of us choose to do 1/2 reverse cubans as our out of the box turnarounds. When you look at the sequence itself, there are 2 1/2 reverse cubans and 1 1/2 cuban, a stall turn, an immelmann and a split-S. Turnaround options are limited when you want to keep most of the stuff down low where it's easier for us to know the attitude of our planes so a certain amount of repetition is necessary.

As for IMAC, yeah, there are only 10 maneuvers, but you do them twice how is that LESS repetitive or better than 15 maneuvers only two of which are repeated (1/2 reverse and straight flight)?

Peter+