Received on Mon Mar 14 2011 - 01:33:08 CETA few weeks ago I was asked to be a judge at the TSA state competition held Friday, Mar. 11 in Athens, Georgia. Last year I helped Gary Baughman judge the Flight Endurance event at the state finals. This year Gary couldn't do it, so he asked me to take over the gig. Dohrman Crawford and Nick Ray agreed to help so I thought we were in good shape. Last year we had four people - Gary and I checked in models and the other 2 judges timed flights. I was told that there would be volunteers around if we needed any more help. As a little background Dohrman and I are AMA CD's with a considerable amount of experience. Also I have run several Georgia Science Olympiad state finals and all have gone reasonably well. All this background is to let you know that I wasn't particularly worried about running this competition.
Around the middle of the week this feeling started to change. Earlier I had been asked if we could also judge the middle school Flight event. I had no idea what this event was about so asked for rules. I was sent rules for both events which I printed out to refer to a day or two before the event to get prepared. Around the beginning of the week I started looking at the rules and schedule and noticed that there was an hour overlap in the events. Since the Flight event involves on site construction of balsa gliders this sounded like a big problem. I was assured that it wasn't since the kids would be building the gliders on Thursday and not on Friday when the flying would take place. I pointed out that glider building was not on the schedule for Thursday. At that point I think I was branded as a troublemaker and no one communicated with me further about my perception of the schedule problem.
Another warning sign started flashing when I read that there was to be a team of 10 people to judge Flight Endurance. There was to be an Event Coordinator (a description they apparently no longer use), three judges (us), three assistants and three other people whose job descriptions I've forgotten. I suddenly realized and this was confirmed in an email that I was not the Event Coordinator (or whatever the current description is). I was assured that the three of us plus the EC would be able to handle the event.
There is more background but I'm sure you're getting a sense of the way things were going. So - that brings me to our arrival on site Friday around noon, where we were served lunch during the judges orientation meeting for our two events. It was here that I discovered that all events have to have three judges. It is the duty of all three judges to record individual score sheets for each competitor. That meant that each of us had to time and record every flight of every contestant and do all of the other scoring, grading and calculations required. At the end of the event ALL of these score were to be copied to a master score sheet, the teams ranked and the score sheets signed by each judge and notarized (actually I just added the part about notarizing).
A few minutes before the 1:00 start time for MS Flight (where the building part actually had taken place the day before) we made our way to the hall where the two competitions and MANY more were to be held. In one corner of the huge room we found neat rows of Da Vinci era gliders. Out of over twenty gliders there were three or four that had dihedral and looked possibly capable of flight. There was no Event Supervisor around, no kids to go with the gliders and no TSA-provided catapult that I had been assured would be there. After the three of us had wandered around for awhile trying to locate someone with a clue we came across another bewildered looking man with a box of catapults and a growing mob of kids with gliders who were grabbing catapults so as to do their "test" flying. Since I had looked fairly carefully at the specs for the catapult I noticed right away that one of them was made backwards. I convinced the bewildered gentleman to put that one back in the box. Next I noticed that instead of the Tan SS rubber specified for the catapults most of them were equipped with Office Depot rubber bands. I decided that this was close enough.
Kids were running around firing gliders in all directions while hundreds of people were walking through the area on their way to other events. I managed to call a halt to all missile firings and also managed to convince some TSA-looking bystander that a horrible accident was about to happen. A decision was made to fly the gliders in the same space where test flying of Flight Endurance models was taking place (illegally). Eventually we managed to herd all the Flight Endurance people back to their tables and the glider "flying" commenced. Some of the gliders had already been broken so the kids held them together and launched the pieces (no repairs were allowed). Several key provisions of the rules were not followed by many of the kids. Since there had apparently been no guidance of any kind as to what would make a glider actually fly we decided to ignore these violations. After a couple of hours all the kids had done their four flight attempts and no one had been injured in the process. The winning glider made a huge loop, rolled left as it approached a second loop and settled in for a series of stalls for a little over 6 seconds. Most flights were shorter than 2 seconds a lot shorter.
Having survived MS Flight we started organizing for Flight Endurance. I had a check-in gauge and a couple of scales to make the process easier. After checking in the first eight or ten kids' models, the Event Supervisor (or whatever) showed up and started barking orders at the kids. It turns out that each kid had to have their model and their box checked and then was to receive a stick-on tag that had to be displayed somewhere before they could fly. The actual flying was pretty uneventful compared to the rest of what had happened during the day. Somewhere after 6:00 the last kid made his last flight and there was nothing left except to grade about thirty notebooks and transfer ALL of the scores from about ninety scoresheets (thirty fliers x three judges) to the summary sheet. At this point a miracle happened and the Event Supervisor offered to do this chore for us. She also recommended a nearby Italian restaurant which turned out to be outstanding.
The end result of the day was that no one died, the food and the (several) beers were great and we all got back home to Atlanta in one piece.
Head Judge
Bill Gowen
This archive was generated by Yannick on Sat Dec 14 2019 - 19:13:46 CET