Sailplane Contest Report
The Quiet Fly Electric Soaring Championships at KCAM’s Sandtown field at least had much nicer weather than the Warbirds did yesterday. As soon as we got there, Ron and I both got grabbed to do timing for two of the three contestants — unplanned on our parts, but not exactly unexpected!
I should have made better notes for this, but I was kinda busy, so this will be a bit sketchier than I’d really prefer. Today had two events, each with three flights per pilot; both were timed motor runs, then gliding for as close as possible to a 7-minute total, followed by an attempted precision landing. Main difference was the power allowed, and a 15-second shorter motor run on the second event.
On the first flight of the first event, one of the contestants managed a good flight and the precision landing, but unfortunately broke his fuselage in half just aft of the wing, and was out for the event. On the second flight, the other contestant left besides "my" pilot went into a dive to get out of a thermal, and overstressed his wings, breaking both of them off. The fuselage had enough of one left to helicopter down with no damage, but the wings ended up somewhere lost in the surrounding cornfields.
This gave my pilot a win by default, but since it was his first real contest, he treated the third flight as "real" even though all he had to do was go up and get back down safely (I think a good decision).
On the second event, the other contestants had other planes to use, so it was back to three. My pilot used the same plane, since it’d gotten him plenty high and good times. This time, fortunately all three planes survived! The lift had pretty well disappeared by this time, though, so all but one of the flights was very short, not even close to the 7-minute mark. The one pilot who managed almost 7 minutes had also had a precision landing earlier in the event (the only one), so he came in first, and my pilot came in second.
Not bad at all, I really think, for a new competitor paired with a person new to event timing!
One of the other club members who’d been at Warbirds yesterday told us that the rain had eventually stopped, and they had an air show with a 3-D aerobatic demonstration that was really impressive before the rain started again and everything quit for the day. He also said they’d been selling pit passes for $5 a person to allow spectators to get closer to the participating aircraft — makes me wonder if the arrangements that blocked almost all view for everyone else was a deliberate attempt to sell the pit passes. If so, this doesn’t give me a very high opinion of their treatment of the spectators they try so hard to attract!
