Ya know, that's what I just don't get at all. The "pattern guys are stuck up" stuff.

I just completed my first full season of pattern competition. I attended 8 contests in the southeast, in Ga, Florida, Alabama and Tennessee. I'm still looking for that stuck up guy, because I haven't met him. I've seen some serious competitors, but I haven't met an arrogant jerk yet. What am I missing? Is it a regional thing?

On the flip side of the coin, I have met quite a few IMAC competitors, a few nationally ranked. These guys were the biggest buttheads I have ever had the displeasure of running across.

Now I'm sure they aren't the norm any more than these mysterious stuck up pattern guys are. But why the rep? I read a couple of paragraphs in the Scale Aerobatics column of MA a little while back, and the comments were the same. "I met some pattern guys and they were jerks, but then met some IMAC guys and they were saints." What the????? Come on guys, that doesn't wash.

Next year I'm going to my first Nats, and I'll be sure to be on the look out for these pattern guys that are causing so much grief.

Seriously though, I chuckle when I read stuff like this, because I wonder if there's really any grounds for that rep, or if it's just a bad rumor that needs to die a horrible death. Because it's simply not true, not around here anyway. I'm not saying these guys don't exist, I just wonder where they're hiding.

I have a zillion thoughts on this subject of why more people don't fly pattern, but your eyes would bleed before you finished reading it. So I'll save it. Heh.

Not picking on you man, I just don't get it.

-Mike Hester