Guys, I've been reading this for a while now, and after my travels, the urge to go back and compete is somewhat red blooded right now. But let me give you some points from someone who can remember seeing patternships before he could walk. Me.

All this malarkey about Pattern and IMAC is just that, Pattern can be seen as being expensive, flown buy people with questionable dress sense, elitist and out and out boring. No two bones about it, and they, are the main reasons that pattern has and I think, always will struggle for people willing to compete. Some may secretly enjoy that elitist vein (as can be shown by the member's only club that aerobob was talking about) and some may have money to burn so the issue of cash becomes irrelevant to them. The dress sense thing I'll just leave well alone I think this is always going to be expected in the high echelons of the sport, but new masters flyers are not going to pop up out of the ground like mushrooms.

But lets just throw everything aside for the moment.

Think back to when we all started this hobby. Now if you were told that to set up your first trainer was going to cost you 4 thousand smackers, you'd have laughed, and quite possibly taken up crochet or something, why? Becuase that's a LOT of money to risk on something you've never tried, and a lot of money to blow if you don't like the hobby. With the advent of park flyers and small electric planes and even the F3Ai aircraft, the hobby is coming in easier reach of people who were shy of the costs before. These are the people that will be the next generation of pattern pilots, provided we can make the ititial phase of pattern alluring.

All too often, especially in the lower classes, it's turned into a wallet race, he who has the biggest chequebook wins the round, and that not only browns off prospective, and possibly better, more dedicated pilots from competing but also makes it very expensive to even enter competitively, and as most people will attest to, if you're not getting somewhere it's horribly disheartening. So people who may have been interested in competing in sportsman classes simply wont. They'll go and do something else.


How do we fix this?

I'm totally in agreement of adding a few whizzbang maneuvres to the sportsman schedule, we need to. I few higher K maneuvres would give people something to sink their teeth into, and I dare say that most of the pilots that would be competing would have the skills to do it.

Secondly, the aircraft, I've been thinking about setting up a little "formula F3A" comp in my home state, what is that? It's for those guys, who own all of those 50 sized pattern ships, like venuses, Imagines, Arestis, larks, zen 50's beat on 50's and on and on. These would competitive ships in their own right, but they've really gotta be kept in their own right. This makes it easy to enter for prospective pattern pilots (they have the planes already) and everyone has the sense of competing on a level playing field. Ultimately the scores should relfect the pilots control prowess over his or her model, not the amount of money they've spent.

I'll get back to you on how all this turns out.