It was a beautiful sunny day, but rather cold and a little too windy for some of us, particularly with the very gusty conditions at low level.

3 competitors decided, (for very understandable personal reasons), to drop out of the competition before the start, which left us with 7 competitors.

Unfortunately Chas had a problem immediately on launch in the first slot, when his motor power was barely enough for more than an extended glide. We suspect the low ambient temperature effect on the 2Cell Lipo drive battery could have caused the problem, but this has yet to be confirmed.

Trevor wisely decided to withdraw after the 1st round, due to the windy, gusty conditions and a desire not to risk damage to his beautiful new hand built model.

John flew the 1st round successfully, but lost control of the model at 55m in the 2nd round and his Champion finished up sitting in a downwind tree. It took 31m and 31seconds to retrieve the model.
I've only had time to download a few logs at present, but I have analysed John's logs and it appears that the motor cut prematurely at 160m in the first round and then at 55m in the 2nd round. This looks very much like another situation where cold Lipo voltage drop caused the ESC to cut the motor.

I then had the same problem in round 2 with the AVA. I had ballasted the model to well over 2kg for the windy conditions and had managed a normal launch and a re-launch with no problems in round 1 (apart from great difficulty with penetration in the wind). In more normal temperatures I can easily get 5 or 6 flights on one charge, but in the conditions on Sunday, the third launch produced an ESC induced, low voltage motor cut at 14m. At this point I decided not to risk any further problems and retired from the competition. I may have continued, had I not left my Lipo warmer at home! I should have known better of course, as exactly the same thing had happened to me a few weeks ago!

And so, by the end of round 2 we were down to just 3 competitors, but at least this meant that we could now get a real move on and fly everyone in one slot.

Alan, flying the only winched launched glider on the day, had managed to damage his well ballasted 100S Tracker on a previous landing approach, when a gust of wind tipped the model over at the last moment, but his 2nd model (another Tracker) came into play and proved to be competitive against the electric models still flying. In the wind, Alan was achieving a launch height from the 150m winch of 217m, some 17 meters higher than all the electric models. I was particularly interested in the log we took from Alan's model. It is very interesting to see that he winched the model to a height of 120m, before using line tension and more winch power to dive the model for 45m (down to 75m), before pinging off the winch line in less than 10 seconds and then zooming at a climb rate of  56m/s (125mph) to 217m !! I rather doubt that the same launch height could be obtained in less windy condition, but it does indicate that it may well be possible, at a club level certainly, to run winch launched gliders directly alongside electric soarer flying to the Height Limited format.

Anyway, back to the competition. The top 3 pilots all flew 4 rounds in total, before deciding that it was time to try and get out of the rather muddy and very slippery entrance to the field. Not all succeeded without assistance by the way.
Peter Allen won the event, with Mick Barnett 2nd and Alan Morton in close pursuit.

2 visitors joined us during the day and were, I believe, suitable impressed.

In summary - a worthwhile day - and some useful knowledge gained.

One more point was that in the very windy conditions, I was not the only one having to push out hard against the wind to avoid the climb out finishing behind me and downwind!  This meant that most of us were actually using more than the normally permitted maximum of 30 seconds motor before motors cut at 200m. In fact the big AVA took 34 seconds to safely launch to 200m in the strong wind whereas it takes about 25 seconds to launch in 5 to 10 mph winds. (This was a FUN competition and we were there to learn as much as we could, so no one was disqualified on the motor run times.)


Martin