Judging seminar

Nowdays, I've been told, there is a judging seminar every time before a contest starts. Not so much to teach anyone, since if you are judging in a big competition, you already have to know what you are doing, but just to go through few things, remind everyone about the rules, take a look at the possible rule changes and see, that we all agree on things.

Today our Chief Judge Nick did the presentation and we also went through the judge currency tests, which were sent to the judges in advance, to fill out and return... Kimmo did well, and have to be a bit proud of myself too, so did I. I took the test just for fun, and out of curiosity, and scored about 80% correct. I had few simple, one would say idiotic, mistakes there, like I seriously did not know which is the figure for a tail slide canopy up or down... right. But anyway, way to go me :)

After some theories we went to the judging position and scored few flights to see, that we are on the same page with everyone else and it worked out quite nicely. The one big change from the previous years, is that there is no more soft zero, but there is a PZ, a preception zero. Kind of an opinion zero along with Hard Zero and 0.0. I am not going to explain the differences here completely, but shortly it means that HZ is given, when a pilot flies a completely wrong figure, a 0.0 is given, when there are so many errors, that the downgrading comes to 0 and PZ is given, if you can't properly see the figure, or that for example a flick roll is not a flick roll. That is the short version. The longer version you can read from the Sporting Code.

After hanging out at the airfield trying to get, or more like waiting for, an answer from the organizer to few questions, we headed out to the hotel and went out to get a good dinner. The food was good again and so was the company, so now it is good time to get some sleep and get ready for tomorrow. If the weather allowes, the flights start tomorrow, so it is going to be a long day...