Being one of the four team trials, the F5J at Milang South Australia was well attended, with flyers coming in from all over the country plus a strong contingent from New Zealand, and Matt via Dubai.

Also a few flyers were having a go of electrics, after a lifetime of only winch launching. So a good turnout all in all.

Conditions were ideal with warm temps, and light winds and any gusting was typically thermal activity, and got stronger as the day went on.

The format was interesting with the organizers allocating teams of 3 per round, per lane, with a timer allocated to a pilot.

So you got to mix with a lot of other pilots which made it more interesting. It felt like I was on my feet all day and I was really knackered by the end of the day, but it was a lot of fun none the less.

We flew half of the Saturday, with a swap to f3j after lunch.We didn't have a fly off in f5j, so final standings were:

1st Joe Wurts

2nd Kevin Botherway

3rd Andrew Meyer

Since this was also team trial #1 the top 3 Aussie pilots that nominated were

Andrew Meyer

Marcus Stent

Nick Chabrel

f5j international 2018 - overall results r1-r12.xls

 f5j international 2018 - team trial 1.xls

regards

JimH

Hi All,

This event was almost called off because the forecast was for 30km/h winds, fowever the FAI limit for F5J is 12m/s (43km/h), so we decided that we needed to lift our skills and fly in the challenging conditions.

5 pilots braved the wild conditions and unlike Open Thermal the launch part of the task could be completed relatively safely and there were no incidents on launch.

The day turned out to be a terrific learning curve for everyone and everyone agreed it was a really worthwile and fun day. The biggest lesson from the day was to get a power system that could launch to 250m, with a full ballast and still penetrate 300m forward in 30km/h winds... hmmm, more work to do!

The only major incident of the day was when Marcus lost radio contact with his model 450m high and 400m downwind and the resultant kiss with terra firma meant we were bringing back parts in a carry bag. :-( Thanks to Hugh and Dave M for their help getting the parts back.

Congratulations to:

1st Hugh Blackburn

2nd Alan Mayhew

3rd David Pratley

Interestingly the top 3 pilots had very different techniques:

Hugh Blackburn had a more conservative approach with his underpowered Maxa and he launched relatively low for the day (78m - 193m) and then surfed the gusts and found corridors of lift.

Alan Mayhew flew a very heavy Explorer 2 with a powerful powerplant and had a more agressive aproach and could often be seen chasing thermals a long way downwind.

David Pratlety used a technique of flying out very fast and very low and then pulling vertical to convert that speed into height, launching between 143m and 220m for the day.

Interestingly, the different techniques worked at different times throughout the day and Hugh won the day with some very smooth and consistent flying. Well done Hugh!

 f5j flight scores.pdf

 f5j overall result.pdf

Al's Explorer

Dave's Maxa

Marcus's ill fated stork

RCGA F3K #5 - Diggers Rest, 18/02/2018

Three flyers came to the competition: Marcus Stent, Dave Millward and Hugh Blackburn. While there was some hope of a NSW contingent joining us, in the end that didn't happen, which was a shame and not just because it was a very nice flying day.

With the small numbers we kept to tasks that were simple to run with self-timing (AULD and L2) and flew 6 rounds, the minimum number. All flew Stream NXT in identical Aussie team colours. Winds were "light and variable", i.e. largely thermal driven and we flew in two brackets with a morning tea break in between.

During the break the weather improved somewhat and we mostly got our times for the final three rounds. After we finished the comp, we flew some F5J practice with Dan Haskell who showed up to do some testing. A relaxing and enjoyable day. Scores have been uploaded to gliderscore and can be found at http://www.gliderscore.com/OnLineScores.aspx

After the deletion of a dropped round there wasn't much separation between the scores, especially between 2nd and 3rd.

Summary:

1. Marcus Stent, 100%

2. Dave Millward 96.67%

3. Hugh Blackburn 96.54%

Thanks everyone Hugh Blackburn (CD)

RCGA Thermal Sunday 14th January 2018

The weather leading up to the Sunday had been pretty miserable. In fact there was heavy rain overnight and still patches of rain and drizzle around on the drive to the field. It was pretty dull however the weather forecast was for things to improve and that’s exactly what happened. I met Eddie, the property manager, opening up the paddock for us and to my surprise and delight he told me to go a bit further to the mown area! It is fantastic that he did this for us without being asked and shows what a good relationship we have with him.

Ten pilots arrived with one coming along just to fly his F5J gliders off to the side. So, nine pilots for the competition including Terry Passalaqua who came all the way from Bendigo. Thanks for coming Terry. All agreed to try out a new feature in GliderScore that systematically assigns helpers to the pilots in each group as part of the draw process. This means that everybody gets involved with everybody else and pilots never had to find their own helpers. It was a great success.  The rain and drizzle stopped at about the time that we all arrived at the field, but the wind did not stop for practically the whole day. In the morning we had to cope with overcast skies and cold southerly winds. In fact only one 10 minute flight was achieved in the first two rounds but this changed with round 3 when all flight groups had 10 minute flights. Gerry broke a switch on his transmitter when it caught on his tarpaulin and so chose to sit out round 1 and concentrate on re-assigning the broken switch functions to another switch. As this was the primary mode changing switch, it made switching modes during launch a little bit difficult!  After 3 rounds we had Al Mayhew and Tom Dupuche tied for first place. Both on 3000 points. The afternoon’s conditions saw that change. As the afternoon progressed the cloud cover broke up so that we had individual clouds and, eventually, no clouds at all. The thermal cycles became both long and powerful with climb rates off launch and the heights that were quickly reached being simply amazing. Great conditions for competition flying and having fun.

Although there were some far away (downwind landings), there was no model damage at all. And considering the conditions, the number of line breaks was small. Nobody came through with winning flights in every round although Marcus Stent came closest with five wins. A disastrous round 2 score pushed him down to fifth place. Dan Haskell came home strongly with three wins to take out third place. Hugh Blackburn revelled in the conditions with his ‘yet to be fully sorted out’ Fosa and took out second place. Alan Mayhew flew a variety of models consistently all day to take out the win. Only 26 points separated second place to fourth place so it was close.

Congratulations to

1 Alan Mayhew 5935.2

2 Hugh Blackburn5867.8

3 Dan Haskell 5854.1

overall_results.pdf

flight_scores.pdf

landing_results.pdf

A great way to spend a day … Gerry Carter (CD for a day)

Sorry for the delay, but here are the results from our previous f5j event.

If you reschedule an event enough times eventually you will get nice weather, and I’d say we pretty much ended up with perfect weather. Low wind, blue skies, low 20’s temperature, made for very competitive conditions and not  a day for conservative flying. Every time I thought I’d gotten away from the lowest launch, someone else had launched lower, so although annoying, was a lot of fun pushing for even lower launch in the next heat.

For such nice conditions, there were quite a few motor start issues, my plane managed to uninstall its motor on startup after a heavy landing in the previous heat (it was easy to come in too fast because it was so calm at times, or landing through lift.) I didn’t have a backup, so that was me out for the last 3 rounds, and so I concentrated on cd’ing for the rest of the day.

In the end, congratulations go to

Dave Milward 1st

Hugh Blackburn 2nd

Bob Wilson 3rd

and Hugh gets a special mention for the lowest launch winning heat of 27 metres,

Here's the results:

  rcga-f5j-flightscores-12-11-2017.pdf

 rcga-f5j-overallresults-12-11-2017-.pdf

Since the December comp. was also cancelled due to bad weather, I’m going to try to arrange an f5j event for Feb at Diggers...stay tuned,

otherwise, I’ll see the rest of you f5j flyers at Armidale over the Australia Day weekend in Jan,

Merry Christmas,

Happy New Year,

and I'll see you in the sky in 2018,

regards

Jim