This is the 2nd time I’ve posted a writeup by “The Kid”, known only to his mother as Daniel Sazhin. He is a prodigy. And he is still young enough to compete in the Junior Nationals (talking soaring here). I am posting this because I think a few of you will be touched by how he lays seige to a task even though this is utterly unrelated to anything we normally discuss on this forum. For those of you who don’t fly gliders, you might understand 75% of what he says. I do fly gliders and I understand maybe 76%. It doesn’t matter. He renews my faith in “intellectual pilots” (if that ever was a thing) and a future governed by by millennials.
Hey Guys,
The contest having come to a close, I’ve collected my thoughts as to what worked to allow me to have a successful run. Fundamentally, my goal was to perform consistently. This has been a challenge on multiple fronts and Nephi has worked out well in this domain.
I achieved consistency in my performance through good preparation, strategy and execution.
To prepare for the contest, I did the following things:
- Acquire local knowledge from past nephi pilots such as John Good.
-Review flight logs from previous contests and OLC to understand the task area.
-Reviewed landout options and notable turnpoints and put them on a Google Map: Nephi Notes - Google My Maps
-Flew the local area in Condor to get better situational awareness in the mountains.
-Flew the 126 championship in Ohio.
Strategy
My goal at this contest was to perform sufficiently well to get on the 2019 Junior team. I figured that a ranking of .95 would be a reasonable bottom threshold. In order to determine a target level of performance, I chose to use pilot placing on contest days. I felt that this would be psychologically easier to work with on a daily basis. In flight, I felt it would be easier to let myself drop down a couple places, as the point spreads don’t always remain constant day by day. Basically, getting 900 points can feel crappy, but if you’re in the top 5 for the day, you’re actually doing great!
I studied about 12 contests and used composite scores of the 10th, 9th, 8th, etc place finisher on all of the contest days. Stated differently, it’s like asking if I’m in 8th place every day, how would my ranking look at the end? Statistically, I found that the 10th place finisher on a daily basis in a reasonably sized contest gets about .95. Furthermore, the composite score of the 5th place finisher usually wins the contest.
As a result, I defined a goal to be in the top 10 every day as a must. Top five was a plus. This was a guiding feature in my decision making. Whenever I approached a tricky area, I said I can afford to drop a couple places to stay in the top 10. And this worked very effectively.
As an aside, at Nephi, the composite score of the 9th place finishers was .95. So I was pretty close in my analysis!
-Gear shifting
John Bird and I have done a lot of work on quantifying risk in thermal flying and modeling it to define when and how to gear shift. We showed that statically that there are really two gears: Optimization and Risk Minimization. Colloquially they are Racing and Survival, but I believe these terms are a bit too loaded and less accurate. Our paper is almost done and will be submitted to Ostiv shortly. We will also write a less technical version for Soaring magazine, so stay tuned!
We essentially quantified the number and reliability of thermals one must have on a consistent basis in order to fly consistently over a competition. I applied this research effectively and saw it as the counterpart to MC theory in my decision making.
-Cognitive/affective decision making
Simply stated, tactics generally are most optimal when done intuitively and strategy must be done more analytically. I pushed myself to reassess the big picture analytically. “Should I take this line or that line? What’s the risk of going deeper for those clouds? What is the lowest I should go in the band?” However, I let the affective black box tick away at the tactics and did not second guess it. That cloud feels right! I felt like I had the optimal balance between both thought processes.
Weather
I used skysight religiously during the contest. I found it did a good job of predicting the weather, especially due convergence lines. This greatly influenced my pre contest day planning.
Execution
In terms of flying the glider, I felt I really got dialed into the LS3. It handled beautifully and performed well too! One of the more interesting aspects of flying this ship is that it has a very good flap actuation system. The flaps have a long throw on the handle and the forces are light. As such, I was able to manipulate the flaps quite actively.
I flew the flaps like how I saw the computer work the flaps in the Duckhawk. Whenever I pulled back and loaded up the glider, I was also pulling the flap handle. Vice versa when unloading the wing. As such, the flap handle essentially mimics the movement of the stick. Done correctly, this saves a lot of energy.
Furthermore, I used this effectively whole employing some dynamic soaring techniques. Especially when flying in weak ridge lift in blue, i made sure to work the gusts as effectively as possible. In doing so and actively working the flaps, I meaningfully increased my L/D which allowed me to keep up with the heavier and higher performing gliders.
Overall, I think that these are the more interesting and/or innovative themes in how my contest turned out and I hope that these insights will be useful for pilots in the future.
All the best
Daniel
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