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Aviation History
1972
1972 - 2104.PDF
FLIGHT International, 17 August 1972 Aerobatic Salon JOHN BLAKE* reviews the 7th World Aerobatic Championships, which took place at Salon-en- Provence from July 18-31. SALON-EN-PROVENCE lies some 20 miles north of Mar seilles, on the edge of the Camargue. When the French announced plans for the location and some detail of the running of the Championships, everybody hoped for hot Mediterranean sunshine, wondered a little about the Mistral and was secretly alarmed by the cryptic announcement that competing pilots would be sleeping nine to a room. There was no problem about the sunshine; it was there in full strength, putting up the consumption of magnums of Perrier among judges and jury out on a hot dusty airfield, turning the British Assistant Judge a remarkable shade of pink and adding generally to the holiday air. Despite local predictions of doom, after one highly windy day, the Mistral never turned up. And there was nothing at all wrong with the accommodation. In general framework the programme and organisation followed those of previous Championships fairly closely. A period of training predictably overran into the first competition day, before the contest proper unrolled itself, as the French say, with stately calm, accompanied by the usual froth of protest. There were four programmes to be flown, the fourth and last being the one new item. This last, entirely free and non-Aresti, had been suggested by the United Kingdom for the 1970 Championships, but postponed because it was felt that judges and competitors alike required more time to absorb the idea. With commendable courage the French put this item into the show. The first three sequences consisted of the normal Compulsory Known, Compulsory Unknown and Free programmes to the Aresti score. The organisation set up by the Aero Club of France to cope with all of this was of standard pattern, the two focal points as far as competitors were concerned being the contest office where scores were calculated and issued and the College of Judges presided over by M Violet, the Chief Judge. In and around all this wandered the International Jury, ultimate arbiters of any decisions which needed to be made, according to the rules, only slightly slowed down by the lack of official interpreters. As each member of the Jury, with the exception of the President, spoke at least two languages, meetings were brisk if at times a little confusing. Nine international judges scrutinised and marked each separate performance, their result sheets being averaged out to give the competitor's final score. Of the nine, the *Member of the International Jury. The comments given in this article are the author's own and do not represent an official view of the US&RAeC, the FAI or any other person or body. Below, Pitts S.2 with the front cockpit faired in. Right, the perennial Yak-l8PS 237 top two and bottom two sets of marks were discarded in order to prevent any possible bias to or from a competitor (although in overall terms this is never entirely successful). It was interesting to find considerable support for the British system of also eliminating the mark of a national judge's on the grounds of conscious or unconscious bias, although this system was not operated at Salon. Under the Aresti method each separate manoeuvre is marked individually, the judge giving his score between 0 and 10 which is then multiplied by the difficulty coeffi cient alotted the figure in the Aresti Dictionary. Marks are also awarded for positioning and penalties extracted for infringing height limits or the limits of the contest box. This contest box, a cube of air 1,000m X 800m in plan and 900m deep, resting 100m from the ground, has been the greatest curse of pilot and organiser alike since the Championships began. No pilot, whatever the evidence, is willing to admit that he has flown outside the limits (and therefore acquired a fairly heavy penalty) and the attempts in the past to make sense out of ordinary barographs in aerobatic aircraft to give accurate assessments of height have brought strong men close to tears. Further, according to the rules, if the wind shifts more than 30° from the main axis of the box, then the axis of the box must follow. As the box consists of at least 20 large panels displayed on the ground as a guidance to the pilot, this entails considerable effort. In 1968 it required an average of 2hr to shift the box; in 1970, at Hullavington, the best time, thanks to some very clever work beforehand by the Chief Judge, was 8min. The French, attempting to go one better and confident that there could only be two directions in which the wind at Salon was likely to be blowing, laid out two boxes simultaneously and very permanently at a small angle to each other. Neat in theory, this proved unpopular in practice but fortunately the American team had a com plete set of box markings in nice white fabric with which they have been practising at Bomande, which they cheer fully brought all the way down to the contest for redeployment. Positioning within this box and any infringements of the edges were recorded upon a remarkable tracking device produced by the German Democratic Bepublic. This device, designed by Herr Pilsz, had been used at Magde burg in the 1968 World Championships and in a number of international and national competitions since. It was not, unfortunately, made available during training, so that pilots started the competition with little confidence in its ability to track them out of the edges of the box; a fact which led to several protests during the course of the meeting. It was, however, the official method of tracking and appeared to be working perfectly as far as positioning within the box was concerned; the jury put its foot down and that was that as far as the protests were concerned. Although I have no doubt of the machine's absolute accuracy when properly manned (as it was at Salon), one would like to see some fully recorded demonstrations of its ability to judge line infringements accurately. It is essential that competing pilots should have absolute con fidence in any piece of gadgetry that is to decide their fate. Twelve countries had entered teams for this Champion ship. That of South Africa consisted of a single pilot, Nick Turvey, who was flying the new indigenous aerobatic biplane the Beed Booizak. The Australian team of two pilots suffered a cruel and crippling blow when, following
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