Paul Lamar wrote:

Vance and I are developing criteria for judging
alternative engines at air shows. Namely Camarillo CA
July 23.

Here is our preliminary list

Distance flown in.

OK.  Easy to measure or confirm.

Number of hours.

If the aircraft has a Hobbs or tach hour meter, easy to measure,
otherwise you're back to trusting the pilot/builder.

Innovation.

Not as easy to measure; invariably a question of "what the judges
have seen before".

Motor mount design.
cooling system design.

What about the design?  Innovativeness?  Workmanship?
Appearance?  Elegance?  I think you see my point.  I think that
major subsystems should be listed for the judges to check, but the
judging should be on those other aspects.

workman ship.

Can be hard to measure; invariably a subjective opinion (like
there's any other kind :-).  BTW, it's one word.  You might want
to list specific ways to judge workmanship such as "quality of
welds", "fit & finish of sheet metal or composite panels",
"routing & labelling of wires, fuel lines, coolant lines, and oil
lines", etc.

appearance.

Much like workmanship, this is hard to measure.  BTW, I'd call the
criteria "cosmetics".  Things like "uniformity & quality of
painted/tinted/blued surfaces", "cleanliness & neatness of engine
compartment", etc.

degree of difficulty.

A good criteria, but definitely wide open for judges' personal
bias to affect scoring.  I haven't any suggestions for further
decomposing this criteria.

performance

You'll have to take the pilot's word unless you fly in the plane.

Did I forget anything Vance?
Can anybody add to this list?

Rino mentioned "Systems simplicity vs complexity" which you
(correctly) interpreted as "elegance".  I concure; that is a good
criteria to have.

Rino also mentioned "Safety issues".  This is very similar (IMHO)
to a criteria I thought of:
robustness: the tendency of a system to tolerate the compromise or
failure of subcomponents of that system.
For example, a safety cable between the engine block and the
firewall to prevent fatal CG problems in the event of motor mount
failure.

Russell Kent

 
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