Stop Press

Forgive me reader, for I have sinned. I have never made a blog entry. I am actually writing this from home after the event.

So how was the comp for me?

Well before I left home I made a list of objectives which included coming home a better pilot and enjoying the experience, (Thanks Peter Trotter for your guidance) Flying as well as I possibly could, (Thanks Allan Barnes) and being a good team member. Interestingly despite some effort at consciously defining those goals, I found some others cropped up from time to time out of the dark recesses at the back of my brain. For example when I was interviewed for Slovak radio during the practice period, they pushed me to estimate where I thought I might finish in the field and out of nowhere came "somewhere around the middle of the local Slovak pilots" So this poorly defined but apparently real objective was met. I wonder to what extent it may also have been a self fulfilling prophecy. I feel those other objectives have also all been met to the best of my ability under the available conditions. Maybe I need to be setting some higher objectives? OK it's not quite true. I did not fly as well as I possibly could. At least for me it has always been possible to see how I could have done better. What I am happy about though is that bye and large I flew better than I have before. As to whether I was a good team member, well I was certainly conscious of working on it every day, and there were times when I told myself to back off and think of the team, Ultimately though I will have to let my team mates be the judge of that success or failure.

I'll spare you the literal blow by blow account of my experience, but I will give you some highlights:

Day 1/ This is the day that never was. It was a good team day. In club class,we all flew together for much of the task, but we did get separated and back together again. Allan and Mike were concentrating on close pair flying and they simply didn't have any extra available to look out for me, so when I led off from a thermal in a different direction to them, they didn't have energy available for getting us back together again. I did manage to get back with them though which was a good feeling in itself. Soon after that it started to become obvious that it was going to be a distance day. there was a growing rain shower approaching from our left and we were going to have to fly through an enormous blacked out area in order to get home. The only areas of sky which were not busy falling on the earth had "airspace" written on them in large red letters. We stayed together after that and were joined by an ASW 15 (MS Mario Schupfer) and a Libelle (Y Christian Lang) We went deep into the last circle until it looked like it would be difficult to keep flying if we went further, and then turned on track for the almost inevitable glide to land out. Mario and Christian went just a little bit further than us but probably not enough to win them the day. What might have won Mario the day is getting the days last hint of a thermal at 300' over my paddock and making it to Nitra airfield (about 12 ks more than me and maybe 6 more than the other guys) I say might have won him the day because it was not a valid day as less than 25% of the starters made more than 100ks. We five had done our bit. I think I would have finished 5th or 6th that day for about 40 points if one more pilot had made it as far as we did.

For the next several days I started with Mike and Allan and managed to stay with them more or less to the first turn each day. I was just a touch lower at each thermal (I could try to blame that on the plane, but I wont) and sooner or later low enough that I just wasn't going to make it over the next hill and had to turn away. Flying the remainder of each task alone I was then fairly consistent finishing around 20 th place in general.

We had several bad weather days in a row in the middle of the comp. The first one is always a relief. You get to catch up on a few of those urgent things that you just didn't know how you were going to manage otherwise. Somehow strangely I never did get around to polishing the plane though :-) We visited nice castles and, to borrow a phrase from Mario Schupfer's Blog, we drank some sparkling water flavoured with hops.

The last two days were pretty much the last chance for Mike and Allan to achieve their stated aim of finishing first and second. I was determined to help with this as much as I could and to this end I started early and fed back information to them about what the others were up to where and when and general conditions along the course. They worked on picking an optimum start time with this info in mind, Whether the strategy worked or not is an open question. I think some of my information was probably of some use and none of it was actually bad to have, but they did apparently leave the start too late on the second last day with the result that Mike landed back and wasn't able to get away again. As it happened on this day Allan won the day. The average score for the team was not high. The stated objective was no longer achievable. However the chances of getting one pilot on the podium were looking good with Allan in second place shortly behind Mario.

The last day was pretty much a repeat of the previous one in terms of strategy. Allan has pretty much spelled out what happened already. I think my information probably was some help towards Allan doing well on the day and therefore winning the comp, but Mike and I both had quite a bad day with Mike landing out in the mountains and me getting home way slower than the rest of the field which brought me from 18th place overall down to 25th. Did the team effort cost me those places? Well I think it probably helped in practice, but it shouldn't have. I was in a relatively good position in a large gaggle with Allan having all the info I could usefully give him just before it all turned to worms. Getting separated from that gaggle was not smart. I spent about 45 minutes in a deep deep hole before completing the task. I was on the verge of giving the day away several times especially after all that extremely hard won height wasn't quite adequate to get me over the ridge after all on the first attempt and I had to go back to square one.

Overall I am quite happy and very glad I went. We have three very strong pilots (Mike, Allan and Tobi) for next year with some very good experience from this year. Next year I intend to fly in the World Class and Tobi will have a team mate in the standard class. It will be interesting to see who the other Standard class pilot is, and despite having stretched my holidays way beyond all reasonable limits already, I'm tempted to go to Waikerie to find out in person. It could be very exciting.

We had some great team moments (like the entire team carrying a glider out of a very muddy field one piece at a time) and I think we learned a lot about being a team and a little about team flying. The comp has been over for almost a week now and we are already working on next year. I think I have a glider lined up and I'm making plans for accommodation and different instruments etc already...Anyone else fancy flying in World Class?

And last but by absolutely no means least I want to mention the rest of the team, the crews. My crew, Keith Allen and Jana Nagyova were both excellent. They did a lot more than I was happy asking from them, stayed in good humour and allowed me to concentrate on flying my best despite some serious setbacks (like the retrieve Keith went on with the rest of the guys AFTER the one where we all carried the glider out of the mud. Yes that's right they got back to the airfield at 5:00 in the morning and went to bed with only a small nip of spirits) Graham Hennessy and Charlie Downes were also powerhouses, and not just on the aforementioned team building exercise. I am really looking forward to working with all of them again.