The day dawned with some cloud and a rather wet field due to all the recent rain. There was very little wind predicted so everyone was looking forward to a great day's flying.
Dawn at SGC
Soon the competitors started arriving and assembling their planes, the usual bunch was there plus a few new faces, always great to see more guys starting to fly F5J. The flying field was nice and busy as the South African national F3J team was also there for some official practice.
My Supra and Osprey ready to go.
A few of the competitors did some last minute test flights and then we started with round one group one. For a change I was not in group one so I could relax a bit. In the past round one has normally been my worse, and thus throw away round but not this time. The trusty Supra managed work some weak lift giving me a score of 993.8, if I did not miscalculate, due to the lack of wind, and land a bit early it could have been a 1000 but it was a good start for me.
Ivan flying, Piet timing.
Round 2 was not so great for me, I gambled and flew out far looking for lift but it did not work out, I did not manage to make the 10 minutes and ended with a score of 746, this would eventually be my throw away round.
Gordon showing us why he is always the guy to watch, he always seem to find lift when the rest are struggling!
Round 3 I managed to get some good lift and also a good landing giving me a round win and 1000 points. I must say my landing practice is starting to produce results, my worst landing of the contest was 6m and the rest were a lot closer with a few 1 and 2m landings.
Getting ready to launch
Round 4 was an interesting round for me, initially I found some lift but it soon disappeared and the sink that followed was not fun! Soon I had to start thinking about landing as the Supra simply fell out of the sky before I could escape the sink.
As I was positioning the plane for landing I noticed a slight bump and decided to try one circle, well the one circle became a second one till eventually I spent around 7 minutes at low level, seldom above 40m, it was hard work but great fun, I also noticed I had a few spectators, including some of the F3J guys, watching this lot, I think they were waiting for me to fall out the sky and miss the landing! Well, I did not and managed to make the 10 minutes and a decent landing giving me another round win and 1000 points. This was an extremely satisfying flight!
Chris Adrian concentrating, he was the eventual winner pipping me by a few points!
Round 5 was easier with weak but consistent lift, at one point we had quite a few planes circling in the same area. I unfortunately messed up the landing a bit costing me the round, my final score was 947.7
Round 6, the last round, I managed to get some good lift but so did just about everyone else. I did get close to the time but again I was a bit fast and landed too early, I need to work on this forcing myself to land later. My score for the round was 980.
Results for round 3 of the 2016 F5J league
When the scoring was complete I ended up in second place by less than 6 points out of 5000, not bad! I noticed that if we did not have a throw-away round I would have won. Now I just need to work on my timing during the last few seconds.....
The results for the 3 rounds we have flown so far shows that I am in first place overall despite the fact that I did not win a round, my consistent scores helped a lot! I am happy with my progress, a few months ago I started with a little foam plane and now I am giving some guys a run for their money.
2016 F5J league results after 3 rounds
The next round is on 16 April, I am hoping to have a new plane, the Pike Perfect ET, ready by then, if conditions are weak again like the last 2 rounds the longer wing should help a bit.
No comments:
Post a Comment