Daniel,

Normally (and in the future) I would recommend directing any/all questions to the current board and the outstanding committees that are in place to handle such questions/concerns. However, at risk of stepping on the current leadership's collective toes, and since I was very involved in the developing the ACS, I will attempt to give you an answer from my personal perspective.

There is no doubt the ACS will be debated at length and this is a good thing. The sole purpose of the ACS is to reduce the footprint of our sequences. The biggest problem people are going to have is understanding that there is no across the board way to arrive at an ACS...so the search for how to judge this or how to judge that is rather pointless.

The ACS is a score arrived at via a judge's personal criteria of a pilot's use of the airspace. As long as a judge uses the same personal criteria for judging all pilots in a given round, there is no issue. As a judge gains experience judging the use of airspace, his personal criteria and scoring method will evolve. Again, this is as it should be...as long as the judge uses the SAME personal criteria within a round, all pilots are judged the same.

Regardless of the simplicity of this approach, there are folks who will rail against the use of such a subjective rule and try to boil everything down to black and white. ACS is NOT a black and white rule and there are no right ways and/or wrong ways...just consistent ways - to judge.

A pilot needs to be constantly aware of his plane position within the airspace and strive to position his plane in the best location to be judged accurately by our other less subjective criteria. It is this constant awareness that should result in the pilot flying smaller patterns and reducing our "footprint" and improving his scores.

In the future, should technology advance to the degree that we can practically and economically determine the exact position of our aircraft relative to the pilot, the ACS may become obsolete. For now, however, the ACS represents the best approach to reduce the footprint of a flight and the impact of IMAC flying on our flying fields.

Believe me when I tell you that the ACS was debated, torn apart, put back together, fought over, cussed at, etc. We (the previous Board) tried GPS technology, waded through numerous box methodologies, and still came back to the simple approach that is the ACS. It is easy to understand, requires no additional technology - just common sense and reasonable basic judgment skills.

Any discussion that helps judges arrive at what they will use as their personal criteria is extremely helpful but again it must be stressed that consistency of technique within a given round is critical.

I hope this helps in understanding the purpose of the ACS and how simple it is. Attempts to make something extremely complex out of it will only result in confusion and undermines the intent of the system.

Roy Barrow
AMA Scale Aerobatics Board
Chairman