Friday 11.12.2015 – Difficult day

The day started with normal routine, at 8 to the airfield. In the briefing the pink hat went to our Finnish Petri, as it seems that he had flown his gear down for the whole flight. He have had some problems with his air breaks, and the gear certainly doesn’t help with the speed.

The weather charts this morning on TV said the same thing as Jenny’s slide show. There would be a front over us in the evening. But she said that weather should be good today. Surprise was that the wind was getting stronger and changing the direction already during the towings. Club class was towed first, but there was already some relights quite soon. Before Standard class was towed, towings were stopped for a while and team captains were asked in front of the grid. Standard class got a C task, which was significantly shorter.

As wind was shaking parasols on club’s terrace, there was again some speculation if it was a good decision to let pilots fly today or would cancellation have been wiser solution. I was asking myself that is it possible to cancel the day after the start line has been opened. We went through Annex A, but didn’t find anything from that.

I had a quick swim and when we came back to the airfield with Pete, we saw some wave clouds on sky, if pilots will find that, they will be ok. All of us – Europeans I mean – should remember that the flying weather is developing much different here than in Europe. Even it looks depressing, those guys are flying! Ok, this kind of weather is not the easiest, but it certainly wasn’t worth of cancellation either.

Boyd (USA) was the surprise of the club class, as he was the only one to finish the task! He told me that he didn’t know that he would make it, not before he was 5 km from the airfield. Also there was some happy faces in Standard class. Polish guys did it very well, as their average speed was 138 km/h, which is great speed even on a normal day. Only half of the Standard class made it back to Narromine.

How to find a pilot if you can’t find signal with your phone?

Adam told me that some teams had problems with finding the pilot, problems were exactly what Lisa told us in the safety briefing in the beginning of the competition: remember that half tank of fuel isn’t enough as petrol stations are not open at night, and the phone service can be bad. Some team had to drive 100 km to find signal for making a phone call.

Talking about signals, most of the pilots are flying with spot-trackers of their own. Annemik’s crew was concerned because they didn’t reach her by phone, but worries were over when they saw that Annemik was walking with the spot-tracker. That’s clever idea I think, I mean how to send a signal to your crew and tell that you are ok when phones don’t find signal.

There was a party at the hangar in the evening, but I had couple of quick visits there and noticed it wasn’t for me. Tomorrow will be anyway a party in the hangar, so I wanted to have something else instead. We had “final dinner” with Wojtek and Pete at the RSL Club.