Today’s sailplane contest, our first of 2006, was a complete success. We had eight pilots flying. Unfortunately Roger Taylor’s BoT suffered some minor structure problems which prevented him from flying in the contest. Ed Jennings, Dave Ruster and several other sailplane flyers were not in attendance today.

I would say that two of the contestants, Tracy Curtis and Greg Clemensen, surprised a lot of their fellow fliers today. Tracy started flying sailplanes last Thursday! Of course Tracy is a very skilled electric pilot so the transition to sailplanes was not like learning to fly all over. Greg, who also concentrates on e-planes decided to fly today using Tracy’s 2M sailplane. They both winched launched themselves and flew all three rounds. Their combined landings were three out of six. Amazing! Greg also signed-up and joined the League of Silent Flight (LSF) today.

The weather was great for flying with temperatures in the low 60’s all day. The breeze was mild at less than 10 MPH, right down the winch line. We did have some thermal activity but the majority of the longer flights were from the wave lift over the gun club property.

I called for three rounds of 5, 6 and 7 minutes, flown in any order, with a 25 point landing tape.

 The results are shown below:

PILOT

 Flight Time Landing Flight Time Landing Flight Time Landing Score
Ray DiNoble 7:02 22 5:05 2 6:03 0 1096
Rick Stone 7:17 0 5:57 0 5:16 16 1060
John Wynn 2:55 0 4:16 0 6:18 8 817
Rich Carpenter

6:54

4 1:50 0 3:34 0 742
Greg Clemensen 1:44 0 3:19 0 1:52 6 421
Tracy Curtis 2:14 8 2:39 0 1:18 18 397
Tibor Mortin 3:30 0 1:25 0 1:40 0 395
Mac Crockett ^* 1:44 0 3:19 0 1:03 0 338

^* Mac broke an aileron servo before the contest began. He simply unhooked the servo linkage, taped the aileron in ‘neutral’ and flew. Tough way to go but he did it.

Thanks to everyone who flew PLUS a big thanks to the non-flying members who volunteered to time for the fliers.
Ray DiNoble – February CD