3.7.2014 – Thursday, strong winds

Janne (met-man) told in the briefing that there would be good chance for cloud streets today. 2 hours after club class start line opened, first outlanding report came to the office. The wind was really strong at the airfield at that point and competition director was thinking with deputy director if the task setting was good after all.

I am getting somewhat frustrated with some of the elements on the website, I mean that there are so many elements which are not under my control (entries list, tasks, results, soaring spot, outlanding map, webcameras, live scoring, tracking, streaming) and some of them are showing only blank screen. Of course I will get feedback from people “why this isn’t working, why aren’t you doing anything about it”, and only thing I can do is either remove the blank element from the website or ask the provider why things aren’t working. What else could I do? If the webcamera is off and I don’t have access to the computer which runs the webcams, there’s nothing I can do. Or if I don’t have credentials to update the entries list, there’s as well quite little for me to do. I could explain this further and further, but I won’t.

Challenging flying day

Flying day was really challenging, winds were much stronger than what was seen on the weather chart. Even the day was quite sunny, it wasn’t that anymore during the landings. Soon it was clear that most of the pilots would either have to land out or come back from the task. In club class 7 managed to fly the task, in Standard class only 3 and but all in 20 m class did use their engine (I assume all of them do have an engine, as all glider types are with XLT’s, M’s or T’s)

I went to see Marke, Jukka and Vesa at the “finish line”, where they keep a record of all gliders which have landed to the airfield. They are also using “walkie-talkie” to communicate with competition office as office receives all outlanding reports. This way they keep track of the contestants. When we had only 5 “missing” (meaning: we are waiting for) gliders, and Jukka went to put more clothes on because he was freezing, I left Marke – who was quite frozen as well – in the van and went to the competition office. I felt like I could use some action, also I wanted to help these poor people who were waiting for few “missing sheep”.

The end result was that one of the gliders we waited for had landed out hours ago and its outlanding report was in the pile of the other reports, then I made three phone calls to Team Captains and all of them answered “Oh, sorry, he has landed out quite long time ago, everything is ok”. Then I got to use the “walkie-talkie” and could say that “xxxx gliders have landed out, all gliders are counted”. When all gliders are counted, it means that safety team can leave the airfield, people who are securing the roads during the landings can go, the “finish line” can go and also competition directors can go. So the outlanding report is not only nice-to-know-information, it also gives lots of information for keeping track where the contestants are.

During the evening I was glad to hear one “joke-a-like” comment: Contest directors were talking in the warmth of the container that perhaps it’s better for them if they stayed away from the sauna today and took only a quick shower instead. The weather was really bad and contest directors were hoping that they would have changed the task from racing to AAT.