better gliders

New CCC and new scoring system

Designer

By Luc Armant on Mon, 20 Oct 2025 - 15:45

Discipline

Paragliding XC

What do we want ?

New CCC gliders with much more stable profiles. Much less collapses during the whole task = less accidents.
No more race on the fastest trimming and higher all-up-weight.

How do we achieve that ?

A new CCC set of rules. Replace the 14cm limiter rule by 18cm or no limiter.
In mandatory addition, score the task differently without the massive reward on maximum speed during final glide with excess altitude.

Issue category :

Link

Read more about New CCC and new scoring system
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Comments

By TomLolies on Mon, 20 Oct 2025 - 21:48

As a fellow designer, I can only say that so far the evidence (experimental and theoretical) that I observed on my end converges with Luc's presentation, which I think is brilliant. The CESS seems to solve the challenge of opening up the CCC to higher collapse resistance without going back to open class madness at top speed. We also double checked the calculations with my team and we end up with the same results.
Tom

CIVL Delegate

By Julien Garcia on Tue, 21 Oct 2025 - 00:53

Thank Tom,
It is important other designer and brand do confirm what Luc state. We need some more.

Organiser

By Toni Crottet on Tue, 21 Oct 2025 - 10:11

Hello Luc

I read about a lot of changeing the task and waypoint changes with imo wild ideas and ideas on how to make scoring even less understandeable for pilots.

But, I guess the CESS
- is understandeable for pilots
- our GPSs are accurate enough to measure
- the GPS can make the needed calculations (cones and circles are easier to calculate)
- the pilots has direct feedback crossing the line

With some other ideas, the pilots see only after scoring how much bonus, penalty they have, etc. More of this, i guess makes the sport less attractive to pilots.

Is FTV questionned for PG comps? (initially developed for League Cups) in HG, only a few pilots think about that.

Designer

By Luc Armant on Tue, 21 Oct 2025 - 10:38

FTV is now used 100% in PG competition. For us, it's better than any other system we used before.

By Hugo-airdesign on Tue, 21 Oct 2025 - 14:14

Hello,

As a voice for the Air Design R&D department, we are facing the same issues that Luc mentioned, and we are in favor of an evolution in this direction — allowing more stable profiles to be classified under the CCC category.

We have already discussed this topic several times with other brands during the Coupe Icare (FLOW, Skywalk, Ozone, Niviuk, AirDesign), and there seemed to be a shared consensus in favor of this evolution, which — perhaps counterintuitively — would actually lead to increased safety.

CIVL Delegate

By Julien Garcia on Tue, 21 Oct 2025 - 15:15

Thanks Hugo. I believe we definitely should open a Project then. Looking forward to Thursday.

By DomJones on Tue, 21 Oct 2025 - 15:08

Can't comment on the CCC wing design side of things, but regarding CESS, it's a very neat, elegant engineering solution, but it seems very difficult to calculate an optimal in real world conditions (at least for the less technically minded pilots).

Altitude bonus seems a better solution for all-round pilot use, still hard to optimise correctly, but I guess that is/would be part of the fun!

However... Is there a reason why you don't just set a "deck" (lower altitude limit) for the ESS cylinder? So in order to tag it you have to be above a certain altitude?

I guess that's essentially similar to the altitude bonus system, but it also means there's zero potential upside in arriving low, regardless the speed/time equation.

Perhaps you could go for altitude penalty for low arrival (as point percentage?), where the penalty effectively becomes 100% below some safe height limit, if you wanted to add a sliding scale...

Anyway, just thoughts, but for what it's worth (not much!) personally I would favour a modification of the ESS cylinder scoring/arrival height rules over the CESS concept - however, very much in favour of updating the ESS approach to add altitude margins in some way, shape or form...

Organiser

By Maxime Bellemin on Tue, 21 Oct 2025 - 19:11

Could this concept of CESS be extended to the turnpoints of the tasks? I mean, replace TP cylinders by inverted cones with a slope to discuss.

Pros:
- To cover less distance pilots might fly higher, which is generally good for safety.
- By being incentivized to fly higher, pilots might fly slowlier, which is generally good for safety.
Cons:
- A compromize in between height and speed that is difficult to assess while flying.
- ?

Designer

By Luc Armant on Wed, 22 Oct 2025 - 00:25

It could even be extended to the start (start on entry cone), so there is less stress on being all agglutinated at base.
But I suggest we don't complicate things now. A small change is already complicated enough to happen.

By DomJones on Tue, 21 Oct 2025 - 20:07

Again, I think you need to keep it simple.

Altitude points at waypoints (climbs?) as an addition to lead out points might be interesting??

Worth mentioning that even amongst very experienced comp pilots, already the scoring systems of LOP & FTV cause the most confusion.

We've got to keep any system simple - ideally even simpler than those that already exist!

By Mateusz Gajczewski on Wed, 22 Oct 2025 - 13:34

Great material, Luc - thanks for sharing the data!
Nevertheless, I believe the conclusions and proposals drawn from it are unfortunately not quite right.

1. The MacCready theory is relative to the conditions the pilot is currently experiencing (as Baptiste explains here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKis-uXcUUQ&t=305s
).
Even though 6 m/s climbs are rare, 2–3 m/s sink or 20 km/h headwinds are quite common during competitions.
In those situations, pilots will use maximum speed, which in the proposed approach would be just as unstable — and even more unstable.
2. Another example is ridge soaring or flying along a convergence line - pilots will use the full range of available speed.

The proposed solutions, such as the Conical End of Speed Section or ESS with altitude bonus, may indeed help reduce the use of full speed at the end of the task, but they don’t address the above issues during the task itself - and may even amplify them. Please correct me if I’m wrong!

By the way, why are the CCC certification tests actually performed with a shortened limiter of 100–105mm instead of full speed, given that full speed is available to pilots and can be the most unstable configuration?
Wouldn’t introducing some form of stability verification at the full available production speed (or even at an extended speed, e.g. 18 cm) be desirable?

I'm also surprised by how much trimming the lines and micro-tuning affect speed and stability. At the same time, I feel that detecting this during testing is almost impossible. Or is it?

Designer

By Luc Armant on Thu, 23 Oct 2025 - 12:48

There are 4 things which tempers the very rare cases we are talking about:
1- Glider stability is not changed during a competition. So the manufacturers are designing the wing that will win, not the one that may have an edge on a very rare cases at the expense of being handicapped most of time.
2- Playing close to unstable zone makes you not as able to use the speed advantage in turbulent air.
3- At high McCready numbers, the advantage of being at optimum speed is very slim, as explained in the document. I'll share the excel file I made for quick McCready calculation (sorry, I won't have access to it before 10 days).
4- On my model, I used a theoritical polynomial function to try to match as good as I can measured points. However, the end of the polar is steeper in reality, so the McCready optimum speed is in reality lower than in the calculations for extreme cases, and the advantage of being optimum even thinner.

Designer

By Luc Armant on Thu, 23 Oct 2025 - 12:51

Regarding testing stability at high speed. That's a great idea. In the EN, there is one test that does some form of stability check, it is the one where you go full speed and then you pull 25% of the brake range within 2 seconds. The glider must stay open. Although this test seems very objective, we fail to trust each other, manufacturers and test centers, in the way it is applied. When a manufacturer test the wing of an other manufacturer, even when it's just a way to understand how the wing is designed, he can find this test to not work. It's still true nowadays but it has no real consequences when it's only about wings for leisure activity. But when it comes to highly disputed competition, this reality can transform a competition into a disaster because of pilots, manufacturers and test centers conflicts. That's why, when it comes to wing class of competition, the rules needs to be black and white and as undisputable as possible. It does not mean that we should not try to find something. The difficulty also it that a canopy can evolve with time on that matter.

CIVL Delegate

By Tilen Ceglar on Tue, 28 Oct 2025 - 15:21

Hi Luc, I would like to challenge you on this point, I think it is worth it. CESS does not discourage fast gliders in general, having a speed edge over others would still be advantageous during the race, only in final glide this advantage is smaller. Give me a choice between current E3 and slighty slower but more stable new CCC glider (with same glide etc) I choose E3 no doubt. Even though there is no advantage in the final glide, overall having more speed at disposal is better period. And let me be clear, I think this is how it should be, a race needs to be about overall average speed (and high average speed is not only final glide btw, its mostly dictacted by thermalling).

Changing the objective of racing and race-to-goal format to suit the technical requirement of your proposal is bad in many ways. We can elaborate on them, but the more logical approach is to confine the design rules to achieve your goal and keep racing objective about average speed and keeping one of the tactically most interesting and fun parts of the race.

Having a higher certification speed limit than the limiter allows for (e.g. production limiter 14cm, cerfitication limiter 18cm) was also my first thought.

- You argue that testing can be subjective. I wonder isn't that true in any case, even if we go with CESS, there will still need to be a cerfitication with similar if not the same procedure as currently or if we go with high speed stability testing? Even testing facilities had different results on same gliders as far as i remember, that is why some manufacturers prefer one or another.
- You mention that rules need to be black and white and at the same time argue that changing the race objective will lead the design and therefore we dont need strict rules, e.g. no limiter? I agree with you, we should have well defined design space for a competition class, that is why I argue against your preposition that we need CESS to do that. There has to be a way to set design restrictions and testing prodecures in place to exclude negative Cm0? I would focus more on that.

My struggle with racing is the lack of clarity in the objective of the race (aka scoring). Leading points do not separate groups, imo they reward the opposite, and final glides are one of the rare parts of the race where pilots can make tactical decisions and understand before, during and after the act itself the risk and outcomes, that is what makes it fun and interesting. CESS destroys that, it will compress gaggles yet again in the final glide because of unpredictability of the outcome and strips pilots of a decision to make a difference, in a world where less than 1 point can put you on the podium or 5th place.

In short, lets explore ways how to achieve the proposed with design rules and testing.

Organiser

By DusanO on Thu, 23 Oct 2025 - 20:15

CESS has already been tested, but it was not so great. I was at many competitions, where we had it
It does sounds good and could improve safety, but "only" for ESS.
And the downside is, that it brings a lot of confision. Nobody knows who is the winner, or at which place.. until the "black box" spit out the numbers.
There is aslo another issue. The height accuracy. Which is NOT good enough!
It might be better to have certain-fixed height arrival over the ESS. Otherwise penalty.
Besides that. IF, would eventually go with CESS again. Then we should use it on all waypoints!!
And ONE MORE THOUGHT. Maybe to eliminate high/cloud flying problem at SSS. There could be "inverted" conical cylinder for SSS (exit example). The higher you are, the smaller is the cylinder. Therefore, you would not aim to be as high as possible.

And one more thought.
What if all cylinders had an option, to not actually tuch them. You could turn much earlier and you could still continue the race. But in that case, some "negative" points would be added. Or... you would just not gain all points... etc... but still be in goal. A careful and thoughtful calculation formula should be made...
This would help us, to avoid dangerous areas, that was not predicted, or conditions changed to dangerous for the certain TP....etc...
Maybe new pool should be done for this.

By Tim Rochas on Mon, 27 Oct 2025 - 17:35

Hi guys,
Sorry i come a bit late into this thread and i will add the message i've put now a while on the CIVL basecamp

If we are saying we put more speed travel in the aim to use more stable profile, using this is assuming that some brands will use this to use more stable profile but some will use this only on the purpose to go even faster.

I would rather work in a direction to limit the maximum speed of the gliders than trusting in all brands to use more speed travel to have more stable gliders.

We must have a safeguard that come somewhere, if not we go back to open class

So for me, i would suggest to found a way to control a maximum speed limit achievable on the smallest glider at maximum weight, this being tested by the certified laboratory test using IAS.
In that case, it's important that the glider tested is absolutely well trimmed, +-5mm max on the trim average on all groups.
The rest of the testing procedure can stay like before, at 10cm limitator.
Then on the others sizes the certified laboratory only check the max speed not to exceed the fixed max speed.
The speed limitator is fixed and documented using this test

This maximum speed must be around what we have today or can be perhaps even slower, let's say around 60km/h as Tom suggested on a post and there is no defined limitator length on the CCC standard.
We can put a tolerance of perhaps max up to 2km/h faster (today we have 140mm +5mm max)
Then we must have less margin in line check. Today it's Up to 20mm, we could reduce to max 10mm faster than neutral
Speed limitator must be checked and fixed according to how we reach this max speed

All this is not really taking into account the question of rods tensions, ok. But we can write that if there is a real doubt on this or a glider that goes faster than what it should, if the line check is correct, the MD or any pilot can go to the next step and ask for a check of the max speed on that glider in a certified laboratory test. If the test is concluded as being faster than 60km/h (we can put a margin of 2km/h or something like this to be a bit realistic), the brand and the pilot can be faced to a fine up to 5000 euros.

For the conical ESS, I'm not a fan of this idea because it will not push the pilots to go slower the middle part of the task.
I was quite not convinced about the idea of Daniel about having elevated goal for a question of racing tactic and "charm" of the race we do today, but if we want to put pilots higher over the ground on the ESS or in the way to go to ESS, or even during the task i have tendancy to be more and more agree with this option

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