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Re: Oshkosh Award Wrenches - Judging Insights?

Posted by Tim Savage on Wed Mar 20, 2002 07:28:02 AM

In reply top Oshkosh Award Wrenches - Judging Insights? posted by t6gg on Tue Mar 19, 2002 10:37:15 AM

I will jump here and give my two cents. I was a EAA Warbird judge for about 12 years. I stopped doing it a couple of years ago because it was so time consuming that I usually missed most of OSH.

1. A lot has been said over the years about the judging being political. Don't believe it. The judges at OSH are the most overworked and underappreciated group of people I know of all the volunteers at OSH. They do a tough job and every year take a lot of flak from owners (and many times the friends of owners) who don't receive the award they wanted. The judges do not recieve direction from any Warbird board members at to which direction to vote and their score is based on the EAA Warbird judging standards produced by a committee. While opinions may vary on the judging staff over which airplane is best, I am convinced that in nearly every case the right airplane wins the awards.

2. The quality of restoraton of the winners will vary from year to year depending on how many aircraft show up register to be judged. The opinion of the board was to award as many trophies as possible each year in order to encourage attendance. This does not mean that any winner received less than the requisite 80 points to qualify for an award.

3. In most cases the higher awards, Grand and Reserve were very close in points, many times in the tenths. This is how tough the competition really is.

4. Historical accuracy is becoming more and more the factor that determines the overall winners. If two aircraft are restored to the same level as far as quality of work, the one that is most historically accurate will win. In recent years this has meant that the contenders for Grand Champion will have flat paint, the proper hardware(CAD I -for most WWII designs) proper instrumentation etc. If I recall historical accuracy accounted for 20 points or 20% of the score so it is substantial.

5. There is a difficulty factor assigned to each total score. This is to provide some leveling of the field for complexity. So a T-6 will recieve 4 difficulty points providng a possible total score of 104, while a B-17 would recieve 10 for a total of 110. I personally think this is one area where standards could use some fine tuning. The complexity difference between a T-6 and B-17 is much greater than four points. I don't have a good idea on who to accomplish that in any case, so I can understand the difficulty the board had in doing so.

6. Essentially, if you want to be in contention for an award at OSH, do the best work you can and put a lot of effort into historical accuracy. Remember that all the big warbird shops seem to covet these awards as marketing tools today, so the competition can be fierce! Overall I believe the judging process has improved the breed over the years. The restorations we saw 15 years ago pale in comparison to the effort seen today.

Hope this was informative!

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