Hi Brandon, thank you for your comments. Well thought out, accurate and thought provoking. Clearly you have a great deal of experience at major events and I appreciated your thinking. I do however take issue with your comment "there can be no accusation of inaccurate judging" although I wouldn't use the term inaccurate, rather the rules for F3A did not seem to me to be applied in accordance with the rules as they are written. As I mentioned in my earlier post (#4) I was only in Pombal for the Finals, I do not suggest that the results were rigged towards any continent or flier but was unpleasently surprised by the resulting raw scores of manouvres I witnessed and some of the processes that were undertaken. My issues were twofold:

1. Noise Testing. The noise meter tests were inconsistently applied (as detailed in my earlier posts) and I could not see how anyone could see them as being an accurate or a decent assessment. A minor issue, but in my view, if you have a test in any competition either do it properly or don't do the test. Surely at a WC this is something that should be done consistently?

2. Scoring of Manouvres. The application of downgrades in F3A is a combination of science (ie. 1 pt per 15 degrees) and art (ie. smoothness, gracefulness) and purely looking at the "science" type downgrades I struggled to see a relationship between what I watched being flown and some of the scores that were awarded. I noted one specific manouvre in my previous post but further to this there were other things that I noted. Staff Turns were a classic, the rules for this are very clear but I watched many fliers powering through the manouvres with the result that their c of g shifted more than 2 wing spans - a wing over - and yet they scored well. Happy for feedback on this as I would love to understand this better if I have misunderstood or if someone else who who was there saw something different to me. The other area was box violations, they happened and did not get downgraded based on the % they were out of the box. This happened on a number of occasions on the left hand side of Unknown 1. (A bunch of guys also went out of the top of the box in Unknown 2 but I did not see those individual scores so I don't know if they were downgraded but they did well in the round.)

I have no axe to grind here, just responding to a guy asking for perspectives of those who attended the event, I tried to do this as honestly as I could in the interests of better understanding how F3A should be judged. No one has refuted what I have said just a PM and some other guys privately telling me "you're right but that's just how it is", a bit sad in my view as it perpetuates a system that could be improved (and therefore should be improved). As you mentioned, the difference between first place and ending up down the list is very small, surely then we should be working to ensure that judges are accurately enforcing the rules as they are written?

All the best, Simon