Finnish newspaper Ilta-Sanomat introduced an idea I find interesting. Ilkka Tuomikoski, a guy who also invented a new type of bindings almost everyone is now using, has been thinking about gates and wind and has come up with the idea. Now wind points are counted from the moment jumper gets a green light, nothing that happens after that counts. From that point on, it may well take that 10 seconds before the jumper leaves a gate. They can already count the wind forecast for the jumper (meaning they are able to forecast quite well how winds will be in the hill on few seconds later by having wind monitors up near a gate and down near the landing point.)
Tuomikoski's idea is to use this information and have a moving gate that would automatically change according to conditions for every jumper. Good winds would make a gate go down and bad winds up. Every jumper would get the gate according the conditions which are forecast to the hill on two or three seconds later (when the jumper actually will be in the air.) This would take away the need for windpoints that many spectators find confusing. When the jumper lands, it would only be about the length and style points like old times, the wind compensation had been already done by the moving gate.
This would also end those bad situations, there gate is set according to very different conditions, conditions change and jumper has absolutely no chance (that happens quite often, when front wind changes to back wind and it takes forever for the jury to change gate accordingly.) Tuomikoski says, that technically it would be easy and not too expensive solution. They would need about 10 meter rail, which gate would move (slowly, around 3 km/h, so it would not cause difficulties for jumpers to leave it) up and down according the computer calculated forecast. This would still do nothing to side wind, that they would need to take care with 'wind shields' (what are those wind cobwebs called in English?) same way as now. And of course there would still be a need to control that they do not put anyone to dangerous winds. But still it would make things go more smoothly and it would eliminate some of the worse unfairness.
I hope they would be able to build this system to at least one hill and try it in practise. It would certainly be interesting.