Open Thermal #4 13 Jan 2013

Relaxation at lunch time in a very dry field.

Hi All,

The fourth RCGA Open Thermal League event for 2012/13 was held at Diggers Rest on Sunday 13th January.

It was good to have eleven pilots turn out for what turned out to be an interesting day. 

The field was made available for those wanting to practice their F3K skills for next weeks World Championship Team selection trials.  They took a spot way off in the distance so this caused no problems at all.  We had an overcast day and despite this the thermal activity continued quite strongly throughout the day.

So, what was interesting? 

One pilot hit himself on landing because he was in a flight mode that did not include brake settings.  The result was a damaged leading edge and a sore arm.

David Hobby had particularly bad luck when his launcher loosened his grip on the model with the result that the model crunched the leading edge on the launchers anatomy.  Unfortunately David's other models refused to quickly bind to his transmitters so that he missed the complete round.

Flying a recently purchased model, another unlucky pilot lost signal at a range where that just should not have happened.  The model came out of the resulting crash with little damage other than a broken wing joiner and some creases in the wing.  Very lucky.

The benefits of modern telemetry (now available with a lot of radio systems) was clearly shown.  Gerry noticed a big voltage drop in the Freestyler 3's displayed flight pack voltage just from wiggling the aileron stick.  This led to the decision to change to another model and replace the flight pack at the earliest opportunity.

Perhaps the most unlucky of all was Theo who, while trying to clear a crossed line while a relaunch was in progress, severely twisted his already damaged knee and fell to the ground in severe pain.  In the photo you can see the temporary knee support that Theo arranged to see out the day.

The conditions were fairly consistent throughout the day and this is reflected in the flight scores.

With seven rounds flown and no dropped scores, the winner, for the first time in a long time, was Gerry Carter flying his Shooter and Freestyler 3 planes.

All the scoring details are available from the links below but in summary ...

All results below...

Cheers,
Gerry

rcga_thermal_13_jan_2013_overall_results.pdf  

rcga_thermal_13_jan_2013_flight_scores.pdf  

rcga_thermal_13_jan_2013_landing_results.pdf

Gerry's Freestyler 3 and Shooter