The Planning

The Preparation

• Arrangements for food, i.e. cooking hamburgers, hot dogs, and possible Saturday night cook out.
• Round up a barbecue for several days, LP is best, but settle with charcoal if that's all you can get.

• computer, scoring program w/ latest updates (learn how to run the software beforehand!) .
• clip boards (4 or more).
• pens and pencils.
• writing paper.
• 3x5 cards to use for the flight order cards.
• lots of copies of the Official NSRCA Score sheets, which you can copy off this web site. You will need one score sheet per round, per person. Put another way, if you plan of flying 6 rounds and you have 20 contestants, you will need to have 120 score sheets printed out (double sided) from this web site. At an average of 5 cents per copy, the cost will be about $6 total. Make a few extra, just in case.

• make up some end poles, maybe about 6 ft. high, brightly painted or with a flag. These will be used to mark the ends of the maneuvering box. Then you will need some center markers. Some old orange road cones work well for this.
• make up a tool to measure the angles when laying out the field. A simple tool that uses three yard sticks is described in "Setting Up Sixty Degree Lines."

• Then buy some athletic field paint. It's great for drawing lines on the grass and it's not permanent. Look at the field lay-out illustration.
• You may need several folding chairs and a sun shade. The chairs would be for the judges and the scribes, four each at every line. Some CD's provide sun shades for the judges and scribes. Not a bad idea, knowing the seriousness of sunburns.
• You may want to build several simple poles with clothes pin clips to hold the contestant order cards with name, class, and frequency. These 3x5 cards will be filled out at registration and will be placed on the poles in the order of flight for each line.

• It would be a good idea to buy 3x5 cards in 4 or 5 different colors. That way, you can have a different color for each class.

Next comes the set-up. If you will be flying off a grass strip, then have the grass mowed closely on the day before the contest. If possible, plan on rolling the field also. Next, you will want to get the box lines painted on the grass and the end poles and center markers set up. You will have fliers coming in from out of town, and they will want to practice a little, so have the field ready by early afternoon, because you won't have any other time.

Get to the field early on Saturday morning and set up the registration table and the registration forms. As every one signs in, be sure to check for their AMA card. This is an AMA requirement and should not be neglected. At the same time, fill out the 3x5 flight order card for each contestant.

Another idea is to set up a coffee pot and some donuts or muffins for morning refreshments. Orange juice would be a good idea also. A little refreshment at this time can help start the day out right. If a club is sponsoring the contest, the members may want to sell coffee and donuts to help the club coffers. 

The Procedure

Now that the day has arrived, a general procedure is in order. Start as early as is practical since it may take a long time to run off the rounds. Nine A.M. is a good start time.

Begin with a pilot's meeting, before the start time, at which time you will want to go over the rules of the contest, how many rounds you expect to fly (usually 6), any flight precautions, forbidden "over-fly" areas, flight directions, the number of flight lines (usually two), judging standards and requirements, any exceptions in the normal requirements, score sheet handling, and needed volunteers. At this time, announce the required judges and scribes for at least the first two rounds.

JUDGES

In the vast majority of our local contests, it is necessary to have the contestants also serve as judges, because we have no other source of competent judges. One of your most important jobs when you run a Pattern contest is the selection of judges. If this is done poorly, you risk a lot of contestant dissatisfaction at your contest. It is normal to have a upper class judge a lower class; that is, the Masters class will judge the Advanced class, the FAI class will judge the Masters class, and so on. However, this requires an even distribution of contestants in all the classes, or a large number of contestants in the contest. An added complication is to balance the judging role among the contestants so that no one individual is being over worked, and will have some break time during the contest. Two judges, minimum, are required for each flight line.

A break down of Judging Assignments could look like this:

Sportsman should be used as scribes only.

There are some complications in judging assignments that occur at many contests. For example, if the registration shows that there are a lot of Intermediate and Masters as compared to the FAI, Advanced and Sportsman entrants, it may be necessary to use several Intermediate flyers to judge the Masters class. Further, the Advanced pilots may end up being over worked since they are expected to judge the Masters class. At most contests, it is customary to run two flight lines, with two judges at each line. That's four judges at one time.

Another technique that has worked for years is to divide a class in half and have one half fly one the first line and the other half fly on the second line. When a pilot finishes on his line, he then moves over to the bottom of the next line. This strategy allows the CD to run two (2) rounds of the same class quickly, without moving the judges and scribes and it works well if you have a low number of entrants in a particular class, because starting and stopping a line with judge changes takes more time. However, this technique would require that the contestant would wait for the completion of two rounds before he can see his scores.

SCRIBES
Then, another task that requires your attention is to have some extra people to act as scribes during the contest. A scribe is a volunteer that is required to write down the judge's score on the score sheet as the judge calls them out while keeping his eye on the airplane in flight. If the judge removes his eyes, even for a moment, there is a chance that he will miss part of the next maneuver and thereby not be able to give a fair maneuver score. The scribe is most important during the flights of the "Masters" and "FAI" classes as the maneuver routines are complicated, and come in rapid succession. However, for the "Sportsman" and "Intermediate" classes, there is time between maneuvers for the judges to take their eyes off the plane for a moment and write down the score, therefore, in order to save workers, you may not want or need scribes for the judges in the lower two classes.

 

1. First, wait until you have all the score sheets from a particular class for a round.
2. Sort the score sheets by individual contestant because you will have one sheet per judge. As most contests use two judges per line, you should have two sheets for each contestant per round.
3. Add up the scores for each maneuver, dividing the total by the number of judges (normally 2).
4. Next, multiply the average for each maneuver score by the K factor and write the results in a new column on the far right hand side of the score sheet.
5. When, you have completed this for every score in the maneuver schedule, then add up the total in the new right hand column, and write it at the bottom of the sheet.
6. Repeat this procedure for every group of score sheets for every contestant.
7. Then, take the highest total and use it as a dividend, dividing every other contestant's total score by the highest score and multiplying each results by 1000. This is known as "Normalization" and is used at all contests. This leaves the winner of the round with a score of 1000 and every other contestant with a score that is a percentage of 1000.
8. After all the rounds have been flown, add up each contestant's "normalized" score for the grand total. Highest score wins!