European championship F3A 2002
Location : Just outside the small willage Coreses outsid the town Zamora in Spain.
The official WEB-page of the event : http://www.ec2002-f3a.helcom.es/indice1.htm
I will try to tell the story chronologically:The Norwegian team consisted of og Knut Frantzen, Kjell Tore Pettersen and myself. While Knut flew to Madrid and rented a car there, Kjell Tore and me decided to drive my Opel. It was a long drive (3100 km each way) without any problems. We stayed over one night each direction (in France), and used 48 hours each way. The total cost of tollroads through France of close to 100 € suprised us. We arrived on Thursday evening and was able to get 3 practice flights each on Friday. The field is at about 650m above sea-level and combined with the heat made the models very responsive, flying had to be done with care. These flights combined with the official one on Saturday helped us to adjust to the conditions.
The airfield had two flighlines and due to the sun, one was used in the morning the other in the evening. We had quite a lot of wind during the event, and it was mostly cross-wind on the morning flighline and reasonably parallell on the other. The mornings started cold (13-16°C) with stable air, but as the sun started to do it's job thermals made the air a bit more unstable. The last pilots each day could again benefit from stable air, when the sun and the thermals was reducing it's influence. The competition started on Sunday and one round was flown on each day until Wednesday. The variable wind seemed to bother most pilots, for many of the expected top-poilts more than i would have guessed up front. My Alliance is flying very well in wind, and i was able to get some good flights in spite of the conditions. After the 4 preliminary flights of the P-03 schedule the best 20 that would move along to the semifinal and the team results was ready, the individual results are shown here, team results here.
The Thursday was reserved for practice for the semifinalist, we arrived at the field at 9 in the morning and realized that 15 flights was already done by other pilots. No problems, my name went on the list and the models were assembled. I was able to get 4 flights of the F-03 schedule during the day, two on each flightline. Hopefully this was what i needed, i did feel that the issue with these flights was not to learn something new, but to get into track of the F-schedule compared to the P-schedule that had been my focus for the last few days. Friday comes and two rounds of F-03 is to be flown. The starting order was not to my advantage, late in the first round and early in the second, no help to get from the weather-gods that day. I made a bad hump-the bump with 8-point roll up and 2 negative snaps down in the first round, dropped over 100 points on the one maneuvre, i had to rely on the 2. round to get a good result. Before the second round I had time to consentrate and focus, the flight went well and the long wait for the result started. The raw-scores did not look promising (suggested a 12-13. spot), but by the application of the TBL algorithm i was 11. Hurray !! I did not make it to the finals, but the result is excellent in any respect. The result from the semi-final kan be seen here.
As the first pilot missing the finals I received the honors to fly warm-up flights for the finals, one for each round. The finals is 2 rounds of the known F-03 schedule and one each of two unknown schedules composed by the finalists. I attended the meeting where these schedules were composed with nothing to do but watch, listen and learn. It became clear to me that the selection of maneuvres for unknowns was tactics, some pilots did obviously not feel comfortable with unknown schedules, and selected easy- or maneuvres from known schedules from the past. Probably the tactically correct way to do it, but pheeeuuuh...how boring! 'Practice' for the unknowns was started with my stick-plane over dinner and continued the next day while waiting for my turn. BTW the schedules can be seen here : Unknown 1 aresti, unknown 2 aresti, and with words : U1 here and U2 here. Since i was warm-up pilot i was start no. zero in each of the final rounds and did not get the advantage of watching another pilots find the difficult elements. The first two flights of the day (F-03 and U-1) was flown in a steady 'straight at you' crosswind of perhaps 3-4 m/s, during the day the wind picked up and the 2. unknown started with steady wind in the 6-8m/s range with gusts up into the 10-14m/s range. Quite rough conditions for unknown schedule with both a rolling circle and a rolling loop (both with one roll)! It went well and i think i grabbed the possibility to expose myself and show that i am capable of competing even with some of the best pilots in Europe. How cool is that on a scale from 1-10 ?? ...I would say about 11 !! The finals went almost as expected with CPLR and Roland Matt battling at the top of the list, the Germans struggeled with the unknowns and occupied the 3 last spots after the final. The Swiss Patric Drack did very well, a man for the future. Also Florent Rochedieu who barly made it to the finals marvelled and climbed to 5'th. The final list after the finals can be studied in detail here.
Technically there was not too much new, of course the YS 140DZ starts to pop up all over the place. I got the impression that just a few of them was as powerfull as i expected, they need 30% Nitro, high RPM's and are thus making a lot of noise (CPLR's was reasonably quiet). It is a huge different in noise from a 2-stroke to a 4-stroke, and the power is not that different. I was surprised at my low db readings (85-87db's), my normal readings are in the 90-91db range. Many flying 4-strokes measured above 93 which i find stupid, too close to the limit for my taste. It is so easy to get down to a safe distance from the limit, so there are no excuse for not doing it. The sound in the air is very different, some of the 4-strokes are terrible after todays standard. Modelwise there was not very much new, Roland Matt had switched to fixed gear on his Smaragd (not so sure it's a good idea on that plane), Marco Benincasa had a new wing on his Angels Shaddow and a few had got their hands on Synergy's. A small kid from Russia (13 year old) used a 3W-24 gasser and struggled with unreliable running and lack of power, his flying was quite good in spite of this and with correct coaching he can be a force to recon with in the future. My friend KT Pettersen snapped the only Partner (Somenzini design) from the PL-stand, it will be interresting next year. A Spanish company had some models of excellent quality and value on their stand, Isac Prat from Spain used a Millenium to achive a 21. spot.
To sum up, it was an fantastic championship for me. Time to start working towards WC in Poland next year and EC in Portugal in 2004 !
Now to the pictures, enjoy !
