Paul Walkers amazing B-17 is the talk of the town. It has four electric motors.
By Matt Neumann
Today we had no official flying. Instead, today was a practice day during the morning and evening while the afternoon had the appearance point scoring as the pilots’ meeting. The morning greeted the contestants again with cloudy skies and light winds, perfect weather for practice. Many pilots took advantage of the morning and got in a few practice flights. We did have a few rain drops here and there but nothing really to write home about, as the saying goes. There was a couple of times it did look like something may be coming our way but it fizzled before it reached us.
The doors opened at the Chapel building at 2 p.m. for processing. This is when the pilot presents his plane to be weighed and then handed off to the judges for the appropriate appearance point score to be assigned. The planes are weighed so we know how much to pull test the flying lines later. The pull test is a safety feature that is performed before every official flight. The pilot hooks up his lines to the plane and then an appropriate amount of pull is applied to the lines to make sure it can safely withstand the flight. This force is, I believe, ten times the weight of the plane. Hence, the reason for weighing the planes beforehand.
In previous years, we had one line where everyone had to funnel through to get weighed. This year, we had two lines and things moved along much faster, which is to be expected and appreciated. It was quite nice to be able to move things along at a faster pace than before. While everyone waited their turn to get weighed, they took advantage of the time and got to greet anybody that they had not seen yet and catch up.
Once everyone was through getting weighed, the pilots’ meeting began. This is when we got the official greeting from the event director, John Hill, and run through the schedule of events and anything that has changed since the last Nats. In this case, we have new pull-test machines and John talked about how to work them. We also are going to try a new score board this year. In previous years, we had a big poster that the scores were hand written on after they were tabulated. There was always a lag between when the scores were figured and when they could be put on the board. This year, we are going “high tech” and will have a TV screen that will show the scores as soon as they are calculated. This should help prevent nervous pilots from pacing as much.
Another thing we did today at the pilots meeting was determine the flight order for the next two days. The pilots were divided into four groups for Open and four groups for Advanced. Both are skill classes with Open being the highest skill class. Pilots will fly two flights the next two days on two different circles. The best score from each circle will be added together to determine the top five pilots in each group in Advanced and Open. Those four groups from each class will then be put together for top 20-day on Thursday.
Once the meeting was done, there was still a little bit of a wait until the appearance point judges were finished. So, some more hanger flying was done. Once the judges were done, the pilots got to enter the gymnasium where the planes were and see what their score was. Each of the planes were put in rows with each row assigned a number. The front row is always the highest appearance point score. In this case it was 19. There were no perfect 20's given this year. There were six in row 19, the front and most prestigious row. In the next row, number 18 for 18 appearance points, there were also six planes. Only four models were in row 17. After that, the rows filled up with many more planes. In row 16, there were 13 planes, for instance.
Once everyone got to look over the planes, they voted on the Concourse winner. This is the pilots’ choice for the best-looking plane. It does not have to be the highest scoring plane, just the best looking to the majority of the pilots. The winner will not be announced until tomorrow when the event director sees the plane fly. So more on that one in tomorrow’s report.
One thing of note is that in today's field, we had three multi-engine planes. We had two twins and yes a four-motor B-17… all electric. It is going to be interesting to see them fly.
After the meeting, the weather was hot, but still good flying weather. Some folks went out for another flight or two, while others went to eat and try to relax before tomorrow’s first official flights.
Tomorrow is going to be a busy day.
