Another day…
Another day in the heat of the German sun… There are many more competitors here now, but still not all the French team has arrived. The Brits spent the day practicing tasks, doing circuits and measuring fuel burn - the airfield is at 1300ft so take off rolls are longer, fuel efficiency is worse and all the pre-prepared fuel burn graphs need to be recalculated.
The weather was fun today, it started off hot and sticky (as per the last few days) but then the clouds built up and threatened a storm. Rob Grimwood and Chris Saysell flew into a large CuNim and spent 20 minutes engine off climbing 1000ft in height before a huge lightening bolt scared them off and they sped back home. It didn’t actually rain but the humidity is high and it’s still warm now at 11pm.
Competitors were given their first taste of what is to come - the German organisers gave us details of the practice task for tomorrow, a simple predicted groundspeed flight, with a few organisational wrinkles in for good measure. It should all come good in time for the first real task on Sunday. The Germans seem to be on top of things, we’ll have to see if their relative inexperience in organising international tasks affects the competition for real.
One of the hangars was turned into a weighing station, since every plane must be weighed to check it meets the 300kg (single seat) or 450kg (dual seat) weight limit (plus BRS if fitted). One or two were close, especially a BMW powered trike with a 115kg pilot. Fortunately the UK team wasn’t left out in the fattist stakes - a certain current world champion weighed in at just below three figures…
Another correction to a previous blog entry - Richard Rawes’ engine has not yet blown up (sorry Jeannette!), although he took it apart today in order to find the cause of an errant oil pressure reading… only to find it was an electrical fault with the gauge. It’s only a matter of time before the engine blows, Richard, so stop nagging me to change what I wrote!
Morale is high in the camp, we all drove the mile or so into the very pretty Old Town of Nördlingen for dinner, and are now sat in the team tent swapping jokes and laughing. Hadley’s having delusions of height (he’s 5ft 6in tall), he must have drunk one too many of the local beers since he now believes he once had a girlfriend. Let’s hope his aims of getting some points in the comp are slightly more realistic.
Early start tomorrow, practice task first take-off is at 9am. Below is a picture of the old town of Nördlingen taken by Robbie Keene’s phone camera.
