Although a bit more competitive than the usual slope soaring we do I decided to post a little about my experience from taking part in a F3F meeting last month. The Sloping Denmark F3F Eurotour & World Cup on the 27. – 29. of May 2016 in Hanstholm, Denmark so here are few pictures and my travel story. I've also submitted a report for the next issue of
RCSD (July 2016) that is shorter and focuses on the competition.
Last year I decided I wanted to participate in an F3F competition this year. Both to get the feel for competition on a foreign soil but first and foremost to get much needed competition practice for the WC that will be held at the same location this fall as Iceland will be sending a team for the first time in more than a decade. Guess who's one of the pilots!
The registration opened 11:00 GMT on Sunday 10th of January and the 45 slots available were gone in just over three minutes with a waiting list forming up. As you can probably guess from the preceding lines I managed to register for one of those 45 slots so now I needed to start preparing for the trip! Building a box for the glider, make a list of things I'd need to bring etc. Luckily I didn't need to re-invent the wheel and could talk to guys who had gone before me to compete abroad and that made things a bit easier for me.
Contestants came from Germany, Denmark, Norway, UK, The Netherlands, Czech Republic, Poland, France and of course Iceland!
Picture: Benthe NielsenWednesday 25th of May I boarded my flight to Copenhagen with a full suitcase and one "coffin" for the glider. After staying one night in the suburbs of Copenhagen I picked up the rental car, brand new X-Trail, costing €74 over four days, must have been an upgrade as I booked an Escort station but I didn't see any reason to complain!
After an hour on the road, a
catamaran ferry crossing, at about triple speed compared to the car ferries back home, and couple more hours on the road I got to Hanstholm on
Jutland. Checked in at the camping place, found my cabin and then I drove to the hill that had been announced as Friday's meeting point. There I meet a group of five Dutchmen that were practising for the contest. I took some pictures and then I assembled my glider but as the wind seemed to have gone early to bed I didn't throw it into the wild blue yonder that evening.
The hill as seen from the beach.
Dutchmen flying.
It was quite obvious when I stepped out on Friday morning that a serious lack of wind was progressing but with clear blue skies and the sun shining it was a bit strange to be worried over the weather! The meeting started at 9:00 with registration and handing over of sporting licenses for starting numbers and at 10:00 the first briefing of the day was held. The wind still hadn't as much as shown itself at the hill but the weather office had predicted that we'd have the wind pick up shortly after noon so we were hopeful for some flights later that day. To kill time many pilots brought out lighter planes and had some fun while we waited for the wind to pick up. Just after 12 the wind had picked up sufficiently(4-5 m/s) to start and at 12:30 we had the first start of the day.
Registration
Pilot briefing, Jan Hansen will also be the contest director at the upcoming WC this fall.
Maybe we should consider Alula class for those windless days?
Knud Hebsgaard throwing my plane, he seemed to enjoy it a bit too much if you ask me! 
I cannot deny that the my heart took a few extra beats as I stood on the hills edge and it didn't calm down when I snapped out of one of the turns during my working time. With boat load of talents(ed: sheer luck) I managed to recover it and resume my flight. The aerobatic show had cost me a lot in time and the first round was flown at 99.04s while the fastest time was 58.83s.
Making nice-ish time in 12 m/s on Saturday.
Second round was slightly better and I managed a 80.81s while the slowest time was 90.93s. In the third round I repeated my aerobatic show but ran out of luck and talent at the same time so I made an unannounced stop on the hill and broke the tail boom behind the wing. I had lot of offers for help and materials from a long removed(1000 years or so) Norwegian cousin, Espen Torp, but luckily I had come prepared. As I didn't see me making the repairs on the hill before the day was over I headed back to the cabin to start the repairs. My German neighbours returned around 20 and told me I had missed rounds 3 and 4 and we'd be moving to a different hill the next day.
No wonder some had two or three planes ready to fly!
Early on Saturday morning it was obvious that lack of wind would not be the concern for us as it was already blowing 6 m/s at 7:00 in the morning with the forecast predicting more wind as the day progressed. While driving to the new meeting point I got a call from Espen telling me the meeting point had been moved back to the previous days hill so a quick 180° and I soon was back at the hill. Pilot briefing was held at 9:00 and we were told that the next contestant would be sent off as soon as the previous contestant had finished his lap and not after landing in order to speed things up a bit and squeeze in a few extra rounds.
Kaj Henning Nielsen with a run of 42.96 seconds.
Fifth round was okay and I managed to fly a 67.62s while the fastest was 44.94s. On the approach I found a violent rotor and made less than an optimal arrival to terra firma breaking the plane near the previous repair. With the whole day ahead of me I drove quickly back to the cabin, no worries it was only 2 km so the speed limit was observed, and set to glue the fuselage back together with the addition of braces for further support. Things progressed rather quickly, maybe the practice from last nights gluing session, and when I returned I had only lost one round of flying. I decided to drop the next round too so the epoxy could have more time to cure properly. It wasn't as I was expecting to compete for a place in the top three anyway!
The braces raised quite a few eyebrows.
Rounds 8, 9 & 10 resulted in 69.22s, 68.24s and 63.21s while the fastest times were around 41s. At that point I was starting to feel the effect of having close to 1.5 kg less ballast available in my glider when the wind was blowing 12-14 m/s and 30-40° on to the slope so I couldn't keep my speed up. It didn't help that due to my lack experiences I wasn't comfortable with flying to close to the hill in the optimal lift. That night the contestants went to Vorupør and dined at Vesterhavscaféen and had a good time, not too good though as we still had some competition left to fly!
Norwegians getting ready to start.
Same hill was used on Sunday as the days before and after a 9:00 briefing we started again in calmer conditions but the wind soon picked up as we got closer to noon. Rounds 11, 12, 13 & 14 were flown with these times, best time in brackets: 68,54s(48,53s), 65,15s(46,15s), 59,64s(41,87s) og 60,27s(39,28s fastest time at the competition). We didn't see many accidents and only one glider suffered badly enough to not be repairable during the meeting but a spare plane kept that contestant flying. Two pilots suffered a penalty for missing a gate, additionally one of them also went behind the safety line and the third one "attacked" the anemometer(see video below).
After the event I'm left with new experience, good advice from world class pilots and lot of new gliding friends.
You can see
more pictures here.
Common sight during the meeting.
Lars Pedersen on the bbq!
Heading into the gate.
Larger version of the panorama.
Few action shoots. Lars Pedersen.
Simon Thornton.
Leszek Durczak.
Fred we need to get the YouTube tag up and running, I've been using "Yet_Another_YouTube_BBCode_v3.9" with good results on my end.
Timelapse of a flight.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9KthqcwcdIStartinghttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moU_3ZVI7kIhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iccXfDO8CpYThe anemometer lost this fight!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmTACa0AlPkFew clips of flights.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=So8L4bOSb5Ahttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnNJfhZUtYIhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LlOQr8h1l0https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1YzKOL1Z3khttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnfwob5kGDshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6NmtmpRTvo
