Silver Springs NSS Meeting
A meeting of the NSS Board of Directors was held at Silver Springs Maryland on November 23 and 24, 1974. All but two of the 12 members of the board were present or represented by proxies, a very good turnout considering everybody had to pay their own expenses. Major items of business involved changes to the NSS Constitution resulting from the open meeting of the 1974 Soaring Symposium at the SOAR Nats, establishing rules for radio control soaring, and conduct of the Nats.
AMA president Johnny Clemens and AMA Executive Director John Worth attended the afternoon session on November 23. After much discussion with John Worth, it was agreed that the NSS would run soaring events at the 1975 Nats to be held at Lake Charles, Louisiana with the AMA providing site, facilities, winches, and administrative assistance. The S.O.A.R. club would again host a 1975 SOAR Nationals at McNeese University, however AMA would provide no funds or assistance. As it turned out, the Lake Charles soaring events received very little assistance either. Soaring was to remain a neglected stepchild to other AMA events for many years.
Soaring rules occupied most of the weekend, both at the meeting and at meals. A set of rules had been submitted by LSF and accepted as provisional rules while several other groups had submitted also proposals for various soaring tasks. LSF had established five tasks for conducting contests in 1970. These included ten minute duration, three for 15, two minute precision, distance, and speed. These tasks evolved into the T1, T4, T5, T7, and T8 task in the current rules book. Other groups has submitted similar rules, however the LSF were the most used. Two events added from other proposals were Simple Duration (T2) and Precision Duration (T3). Triathalon (T6) was not added until 1976.
In 1972, LSF tasks were used for the SOAR Nats. West coast contests were often multitask contests often including speed and distance while the ECSS contests were more often a simple duration event. Some groups preferred to fly only duration with a 3 minute grace period in which to try for a landing while others tried to discourage hard landings by using a landing judge to give penalties for "non scale landings". The general opinion was that soaring should not use judges. If it can't be measured with a stop watch or tape measure, then it doesn't belong in the rules book.
Provisional FAI rules had been released in 1970 and there was a suggestion that AMA rules be tied to FAI and any changes be automatically incorporated into AMA soaring tasks. Opposition to this proposal was almost unanimous. As a result, the title of the basic 10-minute duration event was changed from FAI Duration to International Duration.
There was much discussion about adding proficiency classes as used in Aerobatic contests, however there was little support for including them in the official rules book. In the end, NSS voted against proficiency classes.
About the only thing arousing much controversy was the definition of Standard class. Standard class was defined as having a 100-inch span with no other restrictions by the short lived National Radio Control Soaring Society in 1970. This definition was picked up by the LSF and carried over to the SOAR Nats in 1972. In 1973, the ECSS decided that they wanted a low cost class for beginner and restricted standard class to rudder and elevator only. Nobody noticed that there were no two channel radios on the market so every radio used for their standard class had at least three channels. After much haggling, the NSS decided to support the LSF definition of Standard class since that was what was used in most of the country.
In 1974, the Radio Control Contest Board (RCCB) voted on all AMA contest rules for every RC event. Separate contest boards for RC Aerobatics, RC Pylon Racing, and RC Soaring were not established until about 10 years later. None of the Contest Board members were sailplane fliers so they depended on the Soaring Advisory Committee and later the NSS for advice on sailplane matters but didn't always follow their recommendations.
A rules change proposal to split Standard Class into two groups with one being restricted to rudder and elevator only was submitted to the RCCB by some members of the old ECSS. The RCCB went against the NSS recommendation and accepted the proposal to split standard class. Ironically, the new class was defined as Standard Class while the original standard class became Modified Standard Class.
Except for Triathalon and RES, sailplane rules in the current rules book have not changed significantly from what was recommended in the 1974 Silver Springs meeting.
Most of what I have written so far was based on a report on soaring that I wrote in 1977 for Jim McNeil, AMA District V VP. I concluded that report with: "The sport of R/C soaring had overcome most of the political problems and will continued to expand as more modelers discover the joys of chasing the elusive thermal" Little did I suspect what was ahead for LSF and NSS
The final part will cover problems encountered in the 1980's.
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