Thanks everyone for a great weekend.  The weather was great, the flying was great and camaraderie second to none!

Next year we've penciled in the 13th and 14th April. More details to come but pop that into the diary.

Thanks to Modelflight for your sponsorship.

Attached are the results, summary below.

Winner of the Modelflight Midway Cup - South Australia!! 160 points ahead of Victoria.  That makes it 2 a piece.

New Victorian State Champion - Jim Houdalakis (from Victoria!!)

See you all at Jerilderie.

Cheers,
Tom.

 flightscores.pdf

 landingscores.pdf

 teamscores.pdf

 overallresults.pdf

Midway Cup Advertiser article

Hi All,

Continuing on from from our day and a half of f5j in Milang, South Aus,

After lunch on Saturday, we setup for f3j which would go through to half of Monday.

All up 29 pilots competed, and the the good weather conditions continued through the whole event, except for the first day when we got through only one round before the prevailing wind did a 180 degree turn and got strong in the opposite direction. So we lost some time turning things around, and only did one more round for the Saturday half day. 

The daily pattern was light conditions in the morning, with the wind picking up to about medium strength at some point during the day,

with that point got earlier each day. 

So typically conditions were easy enough, but occassionally a lot of us got caught out on a round with no lift in the  immediate surrounds, or following a little bit of lift back, only to not make it back within 75metres and getting a zero. 

The ground was hard and unforgiving, and landings were costly, if you were going a bit quick or didn't stab it in at a steep enough angle. It took me a couple of rounds to realise I didn't have a motor up front to protect and I could change from sliding in, back to the more acurate but less elegant dork landings.

After a few rounds Monday morning, the preliminary rounds were done, and the top 8 pitots went into the flyoffs

Top 3 from the prelim rounds:

1st Joe Wurts

2nd Jim Houdalakis

3rd Matt Wood

So after the prelims, we had the flyoffs, the top 8 pilots spread out accross other teams and we flew 3 rounds all up to determine the overall winners.

Conditions had gotten fairly breezy by now. (I stuck 200 grams in my perfection) With basically huge lift and sink, it was a matter of get to the thermal quick, and hope you could still see your plane after 15 minutes. However most of the pilots would catch 2 or 3 thermals to not get too far away.

So the overall winners were

1st Joe Wurts

2nd Kevin Botherway

3rd Jim Houdalakis

 f3j international 2018 - overall results r1-r11.xls

 f3j international flyoff 2018 - overall results r1-r3.xls

regards

JimH

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)