It has been almost a week since I returned from Slovakia, but this is the first time that I've had some free time to put some comments together. First of all, congratulations to Cody Remington the new Junior World Champion, David Hobby the first repeat Senior Champion, The German Senior Team, and the USA Junior Team for winning the gold medals! Y’all done good!
I'd like to thank the unsung heroes that made it possible for the team to compete at the 2006 F3J WC. Without your support we would have been in serious trouble at the WC. We were fortunate to have four towers on the US team this time, and we needed every one of them. To all of you out there that supported the team, whether by donating money, buying t-shirts and/or raffle tickets, or helping out at the two practice comps that we had this year, a hearty thank-you! A big round of applause should go to Jim Monaco, who was the senior team manager/organizer/fund raiser. The team manager is typically a thank-less job. Jim took care of the preparations, worked the fund raising, and did a successful job of managing all of the details that were necessary for us to get to Slovakia with the stuff that we needed. It was a huge task, especially in that he has to get consensus from the pilots on methods/equipment from pilots, a task that I liken to herding cats. Not an enviable job. Thanks Jim for a job well done. We had a great set of towers with us. The senior team primarily worked with Phil Barnes and Frankie Burnoski, and the Junior team worked with Craig Greening and Chris Keller, although there was more than a little bit of mixing and matching going on. Both Phil and Craig have been to the WC in the past, and knew what needed to be done to make things successful. Phil took a lead responsibility for the lines and equipment and did a great job with the equipment that we had brought. Once Phil took ownership, I stopped worrying about the lines (a major thing for those of you that have worked with me at a WC in the past). Phil and Frankie went way beyond the call of duty in ensuring that everything was as good as it could be. Chris and Craig were doing similar stuff with the juniors equipment. The towers made it easy for the pilots to worry about just the flying and not the launching. One more thing about the towers. I've never had so much horsepower on the line before. In the past, I've been able to stall the towers if necessary. Not this time. We were consistently getting the quickest and highest launches on the field. Thanks guys, your hard work and diligence were a big reason why the US teams did so well. Finally, the junior parents did a lot of behind the scenes support and work. All of the parents contributed, whether it was running errands (thanks Hal for the light-weight spackle!), getting equipment, or organizing the towers and pilots for the round schedule. JoElyn Newcomb gets a special thank you for her behind the scenes planning. The trip started somewhat poorly, in that most of our luggage didn't show up at Vienna. I think that we had 24 pieces of errant luggage. Fortunately, the airline took our lost luggage reports and promised to deliver our luggage to the hotel the next day. The next afternoon they delivered 23 pieces. Of course, the missing piece was my suitcase, which had my tx, ballast, tools, clothes, etc. Fortunately Tom brought a spare tx along, so I spent some time that afternoon programming my aircraft into his backup tx. The airline said they had no idea where my suitcase was, so I was getting a bit nervous. fortunately it turned up the next day... The cute thing is that I liked the programming set-up that I had done on the field more than the original set-up, so I used the transfer capability to copy the new programs from Toms 9303 to my 9303, and used these for flying in the competition. On our last day of practice before the Martin Cup (2 day comp before the WC), the towers were complaining that some of the aircraft were not pulling as hard on tow as others. We worked the launch setup on the miscreant aircraft, but the towers said that there were still large differences. After a bit of experimentation, we determined that a big part of the launch was determined by who the thrower was. For a full tow or a winch tow, the launch is a bit less important, but when your goal is a 3 second tow, the throw has a large affect on the outcome. The result, I became the team thrower. This was a bit of an effort in the Martin Cup where we had eight pilots entered in the contest. After six rounds and the two fly-off rounds for the Martin Cup, I was certainly looking forward to the slower pace of the WC! The Martin Cup preliminary rounds had really nice conditions for most of the flight groups, which made it more of a launch and landing contest. This was reflected in the scores, to make the flyoffs, you needed to average 997 per round. There were a few challenging slots in the Cup, but just about all slots were won with full flight times (of 84 slots, only two had winning times of less than 9:50). Arend Borst set the stage for his flying for the week, posting 1000 flights in a row for the prelims. I started flying the Cup with my old reliable "Barney" Icon, then switched to the Supra for the remainder of the preliminary heats. I was landing rather poorly in the early stages of the event. I think that I got three 95 point landings in the six prelim rounds. Fortunately on one of them I won the reflight lottery and was called to fill in a reflight. This was the first time that a reflight helped me out in F3J! It would have been a bit more stressful if I did not have the reflight, but it did not affect my making the fly-offs. By the time that the six rounds of prelims were done, the US had placed four pilots into the flyoffs! This was a good sign, as we were able to shoehorn two-thirds of the team into the twelve flyoff slots while doing battle in a contest with 175 entries! I recruited Craig Goodrum to be my caller for the fly-offs. I’ve known Craig for a while, and am very comfortable with his calling style and air reading abilities. I switched back to “Barney” so that I could have a larger plane for visibility at a distance in the long 15 minute fly-off rounds. The first fly-off round was not that difficult, all of the pilots made their times. I had thought that I had put up an excellent time, even with landing a second early (14:56.7), but was beaten by three pilots! The second round had a bit more challenging air, and only half of the pilots flew out the slot. Fortunately for me, the three pilots ahead of me after the first round were part of the gaggle of six that chased the decaying downwind thermal. This dying thermal claimed Tom Kiesling from the US, who entertained my callers for several minutes. I heard the blow by blow description as it unfolded of his struggle to make it back to the field. He landed quite a ways away so had to take a second launch to put a score up. When all was said and done, I was in first place, with Cody Remington in second, Jan Ivancik in third (Slovak), and Joseph Newcomb in fourth. If Joseph hadn't received a 90 landing on his first flight, he would have been less than one point behind me! This was a great start for the US team, and we hoped that we could carry this momentum on to the WC's. Next installment later.
