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The ceremony is over, I got dragged in at the very last minute to act as translator for the Mayor’s speech, at least I got a laugh when I had to ask him to repeat one thing he said! Ha ha!

All of the team. David Daniel is holding the Team Silver trophy.

The medallists

Well, it’s over. We’ve got the team tent down, all that’s left is to pack our own things then fly back. The weather isn’t too clever, but it looks flyable, and we’ve planned to leave early(ish) tomorrow. We’ll see… It’s been a good comp - the facilities, food and people have been fantastic, the scores came out quickly, and in the main the tasks were good. There will always be complainants, some people not happy, but the atmosphere is good now, and we are looking forward to the end party in a short while.

I’ve enjoyed my time as Steward, it’s been educational and generally good fun, and above all I’ve made new friends and acquaintances for future comps. It’s a fantastic experience to take part in these championships, even those who did not fly have felt the buzz of competition and extremes of emotion. I’ll be in Spain for the paramotor championships, and then it’s the Czech Republic in 2007 for the worlds. Yet again, I can’t wait.

This is Foggy’s (Paul Dewhurst AKA Lanky Twat) European Champion’s trophy. The whole competition was staged in a huge meteor crater, and the trophies were made from the local rock, formed under the heat and pressure of the meteor strike.

I reckon it sums the whole comp up. Hope you enjoyed this blog…

I hope they don’t change after this!

Richard Rawes is champion in single seat trike. Owain Johns got 4th, only another 4 points would have seen him with a medal around his neck. His school pupils should be so proud of Deputy-Head Johns, a fantastic performance, only the uncompetitiveness of his plane let him down. David Hadley came 6th (again by only 4 points).

Paul Dewhurst and Ollie Neece are also champions, in the end by a reasonably comfortable 300 points. Chris and Claire Wills came 8th, but only 1400 points behind the winners, 600 outside the medals - a tough class!

The other class the Brits competed in was two seat trike. Despite last minute protests by Rob Grimwood and Chris Saysell, they were beaten into second place by Elari/Carlat. The margin? A mere nine points. Rob and Rees Keene came third in their Raven - another great result given how old the design of their plane is. Paul Welsh and James Lipinksi got 4th in their 582 Kiss, a great performance. Simon Baker and Anita Holmes never recovered from their zero score for backtracking, they ended up 6th. Jay Madhvani and Brad Wagenhauser came 16th, Matt Botten and Jeremy Bolton scored 1300 points and two engine blow-outs. I know I’d never score 1300 points in the european champs, so congratulations!

It’s eerily quiet - all protests have been dealt with and for the first year in ages the medal ceremony will go ahead on time. My job is done, all I have left is a few things: take photos of the medal winners, drink lots of beer, and chat up a certain Czech lady who is completely and utterly gorgeous.

What a week! At times it’s felt like sitting on the complaints desk at EasyJet, but I’ve got the impression that at least some of the competitors I’ve tried my hardest to help, to understand the rules or the decisions of the Jury, or simply to get their problems sorted are happy with my work as steward. Antonio Marchesi asked me this morning if I would be willing to act as steward at the upcoming paramotor champs in Spain, so I had to read out an email he sent me 2 months ago where we agreed I would be going. He blames the temporary memory loss on being a busy man.

Anyway, I’ve got about 45 mins before having to go to the closing ceremony. I’m off to find Miss Czech :O)

Phew! That ‘false marker’ caused a big stink! Wolfgang and the jury decided it looked like a ‘V’ which is not one of the allowed markers, so therefore should be ignored. Lots of pilots found it, so lots scored nil. It does seem pretty fishy to me, and I disagreed with the jury’s decision (for once) since it opens the way for more ‘false markers’ in the future… who knows?

Spanish Hawk. It survived quite a few hard landings, but not the last one.

There’s been every range of emotion in the tent. People’s zero scores have been reinstated, then scores were changed, then complaints were upheld or denied, it looks like Owain has missed out on a medal by 4 points - and he totally missed one timing gate in yesterday’s task, if he hadn’t then he would have got a medal. Even though, it’s been a fantastic effort on his part in a pretty uncompetitive machine. He’s beaten Richard on the nav tasks, then fallen behind on the limited fuel ones (his is a two stroke against the others’ 4 strokes).

Dodgy or what???

It’s eerily not busy right now. The organisers have really been on top of the scores, getting them out quickly, then dealing with the complaints quickly too. Not everyone is happy, but generally there is an acceptance from most that it’s been run as well as any other comp. It’s still not over, there’s still a few hours left before the close.

Very nice Eagle, BMW engine, freewheel clutch on the prop.

I heard that Jeremy/Matt had yet another engine out - the Ebay motor didn’t last very long. They’re fine, the Chuckle Brothers have now been renamed “International Rescue”. I’ve not been in the team tent much, so can’t report on the goings on. Many went to the Irish bar in town last night after (so I hear) a great bbq from the girls. I went to bed, exhausted!

Chocolate biscuits for breccy.

Robbie Keene’s friend Manfred turned up with crates of beer, so the atmosphere last night was pretty good. There’s a ‘final’ scoresheet floating around, but even my limited experience says you should not pay too much attention to it until all protests are dealt with.

The scoresheet is not the only thing floating - we’ve had a huge amount of rain and storms, the poor old Polish team leader went back to her tent to find it like a swimming pool - and she didn’t like camping even before she came here!

Hadders sells toys, so he got some ’samples’ sent over by DHL.

The sun is out right now, it looks as though we’ll be OK today, so we’re drying out the towels we’d left on our tents when the storm came through yesterday.

This one’s for Dawn! Good man Antonio Marchesi, FAI delegate for Spain. I’ll post the scores as soon as they are most likely not going to change again!

Here’s that pic

Having sat through over an hour of competitors showing videos of their spot landings, I wonder how anyone can ever score them absolutely correctly. The quality of the camcorders used (and some are top of the range and very expensive) is simply not good enough to tell exactly. We’ve had TV cameras here making news items, maybe Section 10 should be changed to say only cameras capable of BBC broadcasting standard may be accepted….?

So, some complaints were upheld, and pilots had their scores changed, but others were not, with one pilot storming out of the room in disgust. Sigh…

Anyway, another task flown, and it was the last, so the beer is flowing to some extent. We’ve had a couple of HUGE storms go through, the canteen/hangar’s roof let go and there was a mini waterfall inside. It’s stopped for the time being, but I’m glad I bought a new tent for this trip - my last one would not have made it!

The flying: pilots were given three waypoints, each had a line attached to it. You flew to the first waypoint, then along the line until you found a marker. Then you flew to the next waypoint and along the next line, and so on until you found a number on the ground. This number corresponded to a list given out at the briefing, so it told you to fly to a particular airfield for a 6m touch and go landing before home. Most of the task was on a predicted groundspeed, and there were also photos to be found. Jees!

One current problem is that probably a good half of the pilots reported seeing (and turning on) a marker in the shape of an L. This was wrong, the correct one was an I. Again I immediately got a plane going - Jan (Jury Member) got his TL out and he and I flew off on the hunt. I took pictures of it, it wasn’t a perfect L, nor a perfect V, it was slightly in the wrong place, but it sure did look like the same material used by the organisers. What’s even more intruguing is that the Czech team also sent a plane over later on - at least half of their team turned on the L/V (whatever!) - but the thing was gone. Hmmm… I think there is something mighty suspicious going on, I’m going to check the scores carefully.

Many Brits turned on the L/V, we’ll have to see what happens. The rain has stopped, I’m getting out of here. I’ll see if I can get a photo of the waterfall, I think Martin has one.

Now 4pm Friday, all have just landed from the last task, so beer drinking has started. I’m in the internet room waiting for Wolfgang to see all the videos from spot landings which are contentious…

He’s just arrived. Blog entry cut short. More later.

Quick note again… you can tell it’s getting towards the end of the comp, since the complaints are coming in thick and fast… it turns out that the circle task had been prepared wrongly, and when pilots landed and downloaded their tracks from the GPS loggers, it was clear that most of the field had gone left of track around much of the circle. I went to see Ernst, the guy responsible for setting the waypoints and asked to check a few. Ernst is a good guy, he produced a perfect plot of a circle using a very accurate land survey map. The trouble is, competitors were given an official map to fly from, not an exact computer programme, and a map is, after all, only some graphic designer’s idea of what the world looks like.

We had to re-do the waypoints, it took me (looking through an eyeglass at the chart) and Ernst (on the computer) over 2 hours to put the waypoints on the line which competitors had been given. So, while pilots were given a perfect circle on a map to follow, in reality they flew an egg instead. The scores are being re-done for every competitor, hopefully they’ll pop up soon.

I spent practically the entire day in offices, the scoring container or in the jury room, so I have little idea of what went on. We did precision landings in the evening (I missed the whole thing) but Paul D messed up, landing short. It sounds as though most others did OK. I’m glad to say there have been no disasters, outlandings, diseases or mental breakdowns among the camp, but the tension is slowly ratcheting up. The last days of a comp are always the most hectic - pilots are tired, organisers are tired, the serious business of winning medals edges closer and tempers are frayed.

On the lighter side, Naomi and Emma are complete stars, getting up early to make bacon rolls and producing very welcome meals and snacks throughout the day. They’re doing a bbq tonight - well, I say tonight, I should say early evening since they have been planning a night on the town for days now - time to get the pulling skirts out of the suitcase, ladies!

Must go and make a start on the complaints. 5 pilots were scored zero for yesterday’s task - apparently they flew through the no-fly zone of Nördlingen on their way back from the task yesterday. Two of them are Brit team members Paul Welsh and Chris Wills. I took a look at their tracks on the computer and it seemed to me at first sight that they flew around the town, so now I will have to go see where the official no-fly zone actually is!

Ho hum…

Paul & Ollie are top in the two seat fixed with 3598 and a small margin to second place. Chris and Claire are 4th with 2984.

Sqn Ldr Rawes is top, 3927. Owain is second (in a TWO STROKE!!!!) 3486. Come on, Owain, spend some of that teacher’s pay on a 4 stroke. Hadders messed up the speed task, he’s 6th with 2496.

Grimwood/Saysell are top 3690, Baker/Holmes 2nd 3606, Keene*2 are 3rd 3592, Welsh/Lipinskinator 6th (again in a 2 stroke) 3247, Madhvani/Wagenhauser 17th 1758 (remember the logger problem?) and Botten/Bolton are, ahem, 21st with 212. If only there were 22 in their class…

Took a couple of quick photos.

Nobody sneeze!

There’s been lots of newspaper coverage, and this is the second TV station!

Paul was on form at the oompah band night!

Oh, the grief I’m going to get for posting this one of Anja!

Quick note to catch up, since we are in the middle of weighing fuel for a limited fuel waypoint hunt. It rained really heavily in the night, fortunately most of us were in the canteen/hangar since there was a traditional Bavarian brass band night. Hadders was the star, stading on the chair and getting all the nations to sing their anthems. A good night was had by all, fortunately take-offs start late this morning, allowing the odd headache to subside.

We did go flying yesterday, the wind dropped to 12kt or so of crosswind, so pilots took off from 3pm and most reported that the conditions weren’t too bad. One problem was that some returned saying they had found the marker and it was an ‘I’ whereas the real marker was an equals sign… I quickly organised a Cessna to overfly the supposed ‘I’ and the resulting pictures (along with descriptions from several others) showed it was a neat stack of white construction pipes, about 8 metres long, and clearly not the white pvc material normally used. I sense the odd complaint coming.

I’ll get up to date with the scores and come back later. Those who are expected to do well are doing so, but I’ll find out for sure.

Quick entry while I’m checking my mail. What a fuss there has been in the last 12 hours. Pilots were given a photocopy of a map with the circular track on - but the map was not the official one, which is a total no-no. Everyone started to complain like fury, and indeed the task would not have been valid had it gone ahead. This meant I spent several hours last night and up until now this morning trying to sort the mess out. Fortunately a couple of the jury members were having a beer in our team tent so I could ask their opinions before liaising with Wolfgang as to what to do.

The mess is now sorted, we have issued a new map and competitors are happier… except the wind is pretty strong now and forecast to get stronger so all that running around may have been in vain.

Rob Grimwood has pointed out that there is a good photo of the team in the local newspaper, taken at the opening ceremony. Rob made a remark about it which was so typical of a pilot - you could see Rob clearly in it since he had the biggest head - ha ha!

Currently waiting for a decision on the wind.