As the sun comes up, here is the line up for early morning practice.
By Matt Neumann
Contestants were greeted by clear skies, light winds and cool temperatures. Sunscreen was one of the words of the day. In the past few days, you could get away with not much sunscreen. Today was just the opposite. It probably was a good idea to reapply it every couple of hours or so, just to make sure. The temperature did warm up as the day went on but it was not overly hot. At least compared to a lot of years when it got into the 90s. The winds stayed low for the most part. There were periods of gusts but nothing really major.
Practice was from 7 a.m. to 8 a.m. The judges were warmed up by judging some volunteer fliers at 7 a.m., with official flights starting at 8 a.m. The Advanced class went first and then the Open class. Today's schedule was to put in two flights, with the best flight score being added to tomorrow’s top score to determine who moves on to Thursday's qualifying, or in the Advanced case, the finals. Everyone flies today and tomorrow.
All went fairly smoothly today. The new electronic scoreboard was tried out for the first time. I think there were a couple of bugs to be worked out, but it did get up and running and worked reasonably well, in my opinion. Although I have to admit that picture taking of the score board could be a little problematic with the glare. But we can work around that.
One thing of note is Dan Banjock. He always finds ways to just plain have fun. Today was no exception. In between official flights, he found three or four kids under ten years old and brought out his .010 CL plane for them to fly. It was a delight to see the kids having so much fun flying the plane. Even the oldest was helping a younger kid to lean to fly. That made everyone’s day watching the kids have a lot of fun. However, I think Dan may have had more fun than the kids. Of course, like all of us, I don't think he ever grew up. I know I have not!
Dan did this in the grass area between the horseshoe asphalt. The grass was quite tall there. So when the plane crashed, and it did, the grass cushioned the landing enough so the plane would not get damaged. All Dan had to do was just pick it up, dust it off and start all over again.
I did have an interesting time personally. I have mentioned the pull test in the past. This is where we pull the lines attached to the plane to about ten times the weight of the plane. The thought on this is if the system can take this much pull on the ground, it can easily take the flight loads in the air. Well, I did my pull test and felt something weird. I looked at the lines at my end and did not see anything. The system had passed the pull test. But when I went out to the handle to check on things, I noticed several strands of the cable that I use had broken. So, the lines were in serious danger of breaking completely! If this happened in the air. then I would lose my plane.
I had to quickly go and get my back up set and put them on. I redid the test and everything was okay, except that I was not sure exactly where to set my handle. You see the lines can be just a little off. As in one line is just slightly longer than the other. This effects neutral. If one line is longer than the other, one line will have more tension than the other which will affect the amount of up compared to down. Everyone holds their hand in a slightly different way. It is also almost impossible (at least to me) to make each set EXACTLY the same as the last. That is why we have adjustments in our handles to take in or let out the line length either on the up or down lines. This way we can set our neutral.
Well my neutral was off just a bit. It is surprising just how much difference the slight variation in the lengths of the two lines can make. Needless to say, my second flight was not that great. At least I did not crash. That really would have ruined my day. After the flying was over I stuck around and did some test flying to reset my neutral for tomorrow. Overall, the difference in adjustment was making the up line 3/32” longer. That may not seem like much, but it made a huge difference. So, I am at least ready for tomorrow.
And one more last note. I made a boo boo yesterday. There are actually four multi-engine planes, not three. And I did not get the name of the fourth. So my apologies to that person.
