Sorry if this posted more than once - my posts seemed to go into the bit bucket - probably because of the tables I put in with results. I have since posted the results on the RMSA web page - see the links below.
It was 2 days of brutal competition, with very challenging conditions. We had the US senior and most of the US Junior team there, as well as the Canadian team coming down for a warmup before the worlds. We also had folks from Chicago, Phoenix and North Carolina there. It was typical Colorado - with big lift and big sink. Now normally Denver is not a windy place - but it seems every time we put on an F3J event we get the wind. This year was no exception. Day 1 was beautiful - but the wind averaged 18mph all day long with gusts well above that. The good news is that it stayed the same direction all day so we didn't have to move the flightline. In the late afternoon the gusts took their toll on the scoring tent and bent it to pieces. Shortly after that we quit after 5 rounds. We started up again Sunday morning and while it started out breezy, the morning had some excellent flying conditions, but if you made bad decisions - the sink dragon was there to punish you. We flew 3 more prelim rounds in the morning and then broke for lunch and prepared for the flyoffs. The following top 6 pilots made the flyoffs: 1. Skip Miller 2. Joe Wurts 3. Robert Lewan 4. Rolf Oetter 5. John Kappus 6. Joseph Newcomb The detailed preliminary scores can be found at: http://www.rmsadenver.com/Scores/2006/f3j-p/f3jrp.htm After lunch and before the Flyoffs started the conditions deteriorated rapidly. It became windier than Saturday and we were guessing that we were approaching the FAI limits. But it's a flyoff - so the top 6 pilots wrangled towers and callers and prepared for battle. If you had enough guts and went far enough downwind, but not so far as to fail to get back, you could get your time. But for many - that was not the case. You can see from the scores that much pain was dealt out in the flyoffs. But the killing blow was dealt by Joe Wurts in the third round, who snuck away trying to avoid the sink directly on the field and managed to get his time while his nearest competitor (including reflights) was only able to get less than 50% of his time and many much less. This put Joe far in the lead. The fourth round of the flyoffs found everyone pretty much getting a bunch of time, but the wind had switched almost 90 degrees making launches a scary proposition and causing many line problems. We had a choice of turning the flight line into the wind, or calling it quits - and after a pilot vote we chose to end the event. The final order was: 1. JOE WURTS 2. ROLF OETTER 3. BOB LEWAN 4. JOSEPH NEWCOMB 5. SKIP MILLER 6. JOHN KAPPUS The details of the final standings of the Flyoffs can be found at: http://www.rmsadenver.com/Scores/2006/f3j-f/f3jrf.htm Jim Monaco US F3J Team Manager 2006 RCSE-List facilities provided by Model Airplane News. Send "subscribe" and "unsubscribe" requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please note that subscribe and unsubscribe messages must be sent in text only format with MIME turned off. Email sent from web based email such as Hotmail and AOL are generally NOT in text format
