Back in Canada and lessons learned

Virginia and I arrived back in Toronto last night where we were met by Dave Carter after clearing custom's and chatted with him for the 20 minutes it took for our luggage to arrive on the carousel.

After picking up the luggage we were met by Martin Brassard who drove us back to his house where a very happy dog was waiting for us. This is the longest she has been away from us in seven years! Fortunately, she knows Martin and Christina really well and can tolerate Cosmo's persistence.

Our last day in Germany was spent touring the Alexander Schliecher Factory. We had a personal 2 1/2 hour guided tour and saw everything. We saw SOSA's two K-21's on the production line and were also able to see the new ASH-30 in development.

Now it is back to SOSA for the Youth Camp for the next 10 days.

Some lessons that we learned at this contest were real eye-openers. In North America, we consider contest flying an individual effort, while at the Worlds it is really a team effort. Besides the obvious team effort of multiple pilots in one class helping each other, the large teams have a huge support staff on the ground as well. These people are looking at real time satellite to advise of changing weather conditions, spying on the other teams to determine when they will start and of course passing all of this information to their pilots.

This is something that we were missing, although by having a shared frequency with the Irish and Japanese team, we were able to garner some good information by listening to them.

Another lesson is the need for a good ground station and high antenna so the team on the ground can make contact with the pilots throughout the task area. We were extremely limited by our handheld radios.

Another big challenge for us was the 220 V electrical supply in Europe. All of our battery chargers/ radio chargers were 110 V and running them through transformers was not very effective.

All in all the competition was an amazing experience and I would like to thank everyone here who sent their support to us throughout the contest and I would also like to thank everyone who helped support us through donations during our fund-raising - you made this possible!

Wasserkuppe

Yesterday, Virginia and I drove the glider back to Poppenhausen and today we drove up the the Wasserkuppe to see this famous gliding site. The site is marked by the fleiger Denkmals a monument that was erected in 1923 to honour early gliding pioneers who lost their lives during the early days of the quest for motorless flight.





The Wasserkuppe is actually the name of the mountain and flying activities have been going on there since about 1910. Today, there is a soaring club/school/ commercial operation. I counted 3 Duo's and 3 K-21's that were busy doing flights for visitors, and there were hundreds of people standing around watching.

There was also para-gliding for the mentally unstable on another corner of the hill top.

and RC gliders ridge soaring on another corner. There were some amazing models. I saw one model of a Ka6 that had a wing span of about 2 m. In the air it looked real.


Tomorrow we are off to the Schliecher factory for a morning tour and a look at SOSA's K-21's that are currently in production.

Berlin Sight Seeing

On the last rain day virginia and I took the train into Berlin for a little sight seeing. The first picture shows the Reichstag building complete with dome. The last time i was in Berlin in 1992, there was no dome. It had been destroyed in the second World War and only recently rebuilt.


This is the victory column (Siegessäule) built in the ;ate 1800's to comemorate the vitories in the Danish- Prussian, Franco-Prussian and Austro-Prussian wars.


The Bradenburg Gate is a major attraction in Berlin and was one of the first places where the fall of the communist GDR government was celebrated before the unification of Germany. This picture is taken from the east side of the gate in what was once the communist area of Berlin.

Starbucks is everywhere - I though this picture was quite a juxtaposition of the symbol of capitalism - Starbucks - located in the former communist zone of Berlin right beside the Bradenburg gate! It was not there in 1992 during my last visit.

Tomorrow, Virginia and I head back to Poppenhusen to drop off the glider and we will stay there a couple of days and visit the Wasserkuppe and particularly the Gliding Museum at the Wasserkuppe.

Day 8 - more cirrus

The task for today was a 422 km triangle to the east and then south.  The eastern most turnpoint was in Poland as was most of the second leg.  The run to the first turn was quite good and I averaged 134 km/hr.  Then the cirrus came in for the second leg.  My speed on this leg was a meager 66 km/hr!  In hind sight I deviated too much to chase the cu and flew 123 km to cover the leg distance of 88 km.

 

On the third leg I was able to connect with the gaggle of the British and French Teams and thought that we were doing well, as it turns out they were having a bad day and our gaggle was 20 km/hr slower then the rest of the class.  In this gaggle were 5 of the top 10 pilots in our class, so I thought I was in good company.  Our gaggle averaged 2.3 knot lift on the 173 km leg home and the other gaggles in front of us averaged over 3 kts.

 

Tomorrow is the last day and it looks like a rain day.

Dave

Day 7 - a costly minute

Yesterday, I taggged the Berlin airspace and as a result was scored as a landout at that point - 10 km into the task!  I was trying to re-boot my PDA and wasn't paying enough attention to navigation.  This was a very costly minute as it dropped me from 18th on the day to last and also dropped my overall position from 23 to 38.

 

Despite this I had a reasonable flight yesterday and as you can see from the picture the conditions were pretty good.  The wind was blowing again at 25-30 kts, but some nice cloud streets formed.  On the one leg into the wind I managed 102 km/hr with an L/D of 93 flying along a cloudstreet.  The last leg was across the cloudstreets, but still with a headwind component and it was quite difficult as we had to jump from street to street.

Dave

Rain Day

Today is another rain day and at the 1230 briefing the day was cancelled, so Virginia and I are on our way into Berlin for the rest of the day to see the sights.

Dave

Day 6

Today we had a mixed bag of weather with cu spreading out to start the day and then cirrus moving in later.  Fortunately, the moisture dried out to stop the spread out and most of the cirrus stayed south of the task area.

 

Unfortunately, for the third day in a row we had a turnpoint at Torgau which has been a hole every other day and today was no different.  Torgau is just south of the Elbe river and there is not much lift along the river.  Needless to say I had a bad time on that leg and spent most of it between 2200 - 3300 AGL..

 

I was 95 km/hr today and most of the pack was in the 105-110 range, so the few holes lost me lots of time and speed.

 

There have been very few days here where the weather has not had some sort of trick to it, be it wind, or spread out or cirrus clouds, but the airmasses have been unstable enough that we can still get around.

 

 

 

 

Dave