[Andrew Fernie]

Dwight and I spoke for a few minutes today about the organization of the upcoming indoor season. As a reminder, we have worked the last couple of seasons with a clock system that splits the time into five minute slots. Each slot is assigned one of four colors, and sets of matching clothes pins are provided. Normally we alternate heli and airplane, so we have two slots for each aircraft type. We normally allow six pins for each color. Each pilot is supposed to take a clothes pin when he arrives and fly when his color comes up.

There were a few comments last year that some pilots were flying both helicopters and airplanes, and therefore flying in every second slot. (guilty) While we want to allow people to make best use of our time in the gym, the question does come up as to why it is O.K. for a pilot to fly one airplane slot and one heli slot while it is not O.K. for an airplane pilot to fly in both airplane slots (and the equivalent situation for heli pilots flying both heli slots).

We had a few ideas for resolving this, but most of them got complicated and would require someone to spend the entire evening managing the slots. I can't see anybody getting too interested in that.

So, we came up with the following suggestion:
1. We keep the five minute slot time, but use six colors of clothes pins rather than four. Again, we have six clothes pins of each color available (maybe five for helis due to gym layout, but we can discuss this).
2. Pilots can take any two colored pins when they arrive. This could be two airplane, two heli, or one of each.

This approach allows pilots to fly in one out of three slots rather than the one out of four that we have in principle been allowing in the past.

We can tune the arrangements in the event that there are few flyers one evening, or a big imbalance between heli and airplane flyers, but the basic principle needs to be that we give people equal chances to fly.

One other complication we have had is that people sometimes keep their pins from one week to the next so we have trouble keeping the number of pins for each color fixed. So, if you find yourself in this situation this year, please return your pin to the bag of spares and take a new pin from the board if there is one available. If there are none on the board for the color you used the previous week that slot is full, so pick another slot.

Any comments on this approach or other suggestions?

Andrew