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!