Wednesday In France

This from Les on RCSoaringcommunities.co.nz

Second day of practice today, we got the filed about 8 and had it to ourselves for a few hours before the Aussies and South Africans turned up. We bungeed most of the time, managing 4 up for landing practice on a countdown, we are much better dialled in than the other teams so far.
Scott has a couple of minor repairs going on right now, rudder horn and a cracked fuse, seems the new honeycomb layups are a bit light, all are breaking. Yes Aneil, the Aussies are breaking things all over the place keeping their repair guy busy. 2 SA juniors had a mid air 15 mins after they started flying and landed in a corn field, both found.
A big storm interrupted the day, massive thunder and lightning storm came over the field, luckily there are some shelter near by for us to hide under.
Aneil, the food is good, burger and chips last night and pizza today ;-)
No seriously it was....

Bakeries are great and we got good bread rolls etc,taking lots of photos, just the connection here is crap and keeps getting hijacked by the free sponsor, hopefully it will be better at the field once the wc starts.

Planning on another early start tomorrow to beat the rush and then a free afternoon to go see some local sights, the town is very beautiful and it would be a shame to not see much of it, plus Joes arm needs a rest for a day or so.





And this is a description that I wrote of the way the competition works:

F3J is a competition with just one task- you have to get the longest flight time within the 10 minutes allowed for each slot. And make a precision landing.

So essentially the guys will be aiming to launch on the buzzer and get off the line in the shortest possible time whilst still getting good height of the tow. The gliders are launched using a two man pulley tow (http://www.torreypinesgulls.org/f3jtow.htm).

Obviously they also want to land on the spot practically a split second before the buzzer goes at 10 minutes. Last worlds the guys were generally getting times of between 9min 51 sec to 9 mins 54 sec (Joe does better than that).

The landing is allocated points according to how close the nose of the glider is to the spot. Less than 20 cm = 100 points 20-40cm =95pts 40-60 cm 90pts and then 5 points less for every metre out. No points for a landing that is more that 15 metres from the spot.

If you screw up the launch you can relaunch once more but obviously if you have to opt for that it needs to be a quickly made decision because you are loosing precious time in between.

In New Zealand when we fly this comp each round would have a few slots with maybe four - six pilots in the air at any one time. In the Jura Cup which is the pre worlds competition open to everyone there are 192 entries. I believe that Les said the groups were 70 odd pilots- so if you can imagine a buzzer going off and 17 guys launching in that next split second- you can get a feel for how intense it is. There are less for the World cup as each country is only allowed 3 snr and 3 jnr pilots. There is a matrix which tries to allow each pilot to fly against as many of the other pilots as possible over the entire competition (frequencies allowing).

They fly 12 rounds. Each competitors two worst rounds are thrown away and don't count towards their final score. Then the top 12 (I think) compete in a six round fly off one score from which is thrown away.

The final score is the time plus the landing which is then normalised against the others in the group that flew that slot in the round. In other words the guy(s) with the best score gets 1000 points and the rest a percentage of that based on their score relative the the first guys. As an example Les flew a 9.53.5 and got a 100 points for his landing in 2008 which gave him a raw score of 693.5. Which ended up being 998.7 points after it was normalised. You can see from that how tight it is and how much missing the landing or having to relaunch could mess you up if you do it more than twice.

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