USA Soaring Team

It was a long day today. The day started with the opening ceremonies, and we proceeded to pilots meetings, where tasks were given out. Club class had a 531km task. Last year at the World Open Class Championships the longest task called was 507km. This again shows the remarkable soaring conditions here in Rayskala. The guys used the good weather and did well, with a speed of 100.9 km/h each. That speed gave them 12th and 17th place due to handicaps. They sounded like they were doing a good job of team flying over the radio and both had smiles on their faces upon landing.

Both US team pilots have commented that the people flying their own ships seem to have a performance advantage. The Standard Cirrus gliders they were flying with today seemed to climb with them and even have a very close high speed cruise performance similar to theirs. Overseas competitors like ourselves have to spend a large amount of effort and energy to get the gliders' instrumentation the way they want it and figure out where to put batteries as some have minimal systems not designed for competition. Resealing controls and replacing mylar is for the most part out of the question and other performance enhancements prove too costly to implement on another person's glider. But, it is all a part of international glider competition.

It looks as if we will have good weather through the rest of the week. Rumor is that they will have another long task tomorrow. Stay tuned.

-Mike