Yep, we had a F5J contest today instead of ALES contest and it was great we had five pilots come out me, Wayne, Rich S, Dave Q, and Bill O. When I arrived at the field Wayne and Bill O were already there Wayne was setting up the equipment for F5J Bill O was getting his Volo together I got my tent set up and I put my two Volos together I decided to fly the Volo SL all contest with the lite as my back up. The Volo is still a very capable plane even though it came out so long ago and I’ve really come to know it. We did a pilots meeting I got the live stream going on my YouTube account a we were about to get in the air and Rich S had a radio issue with his plane luckily we had a resident FRsky expert Bill O there and with some work they got things figured out enough to get him in the air.
We got to first round the count down to launch was going off the horn sounded I flipped the motor switch and nothing no motor at all I tried it twice I finally unplugged the battery and plugged it back in and the motor turned on. Apparently there is a fail safe somewhere when I turn the plane on before the transmitter the motor won’t run, usually I turn the transmitter on then the plane but for some reason I did it backwards this time, I threw the plane and I managed a 9:27 50 landing and a 80 meter launch the 9:27 is because of the motor not turning on. The next few rounds were pretty quiet with my launches getting lower as they went by round 5 I launched to 45 meters! And I believe one round it was just Bill O and I flying that might have been the round where we had a pull towards the NW corner of the field when the horn sounded I went there found some lift waited for the motor to turn off and waited another ten seconds before I started my climb out and it wasn’t much as a climb out the lift was there but it wasn’t that great with short flights for a few. The timer said 4 minutes remaining and I said to myself I don’t have 4 minutes air so I went to the SW corner found some lift and took it up and out and I made time with a good landing and a good launch, today was such a blur I don’t remember what happened round to round. That is except for round 6 my worst flight of the day, when we went to launch there was a dust devil working it way along the east side of the field kicking up corn husks we launched I went behind the dust devil and I tried to find the lift at about 20 meters I caught what I guess was the edge of the lift my plane got flipped past vertical and by the time I corrected it I lost all my altitude and had decided to make it back to the landing tape but fell short but I did launch to 35 meters!
Round 7 was a good flight with a really strong thermal. Lift for pretty much the entire contest was strong and turbulent and I did think about switching to lite because it was a little heavier than the SL. We launched and went to the NE side of the field over the corn found the lift and did my normal f5j thing the motor went off waited ten seconds and the lift was good I mean very good I managed a 9:57 with a 35 landing and a 35 meter launch.
Round 8 was much of the same find the read go there and go up and I mean up I can’t discuss it here if you know what that means. This round Wayne had a scary moment where he lost sight of his plane while it was specked out but with some help he found it again, I’ll let him tell that story, I would have helped by I was also specked out which to be honest wasn’t needed but it is fun to sometimes see how high you can get. The lift was so good today that even getting down low enough to land was a challenge and this round I was late so I got a 9:59 with a zero landing and 66 meter launch which I thought was lower.
At the end of the day here were the standings, I believe I left only 91 points out there. Wayne has the points for every one.
Brendan
Wayne
Bill
Dave
Rich
I’m hoping more people try f5j it’s fun and it’s challenging and makes you think and I’m excited for next months tour event. The equipment we have worked great and Wayne has done a great job getting it all together and making it all work so thank you Wayne.
Like is always said you should
Have been there.
Brendan
Dave Q.
Hi Gents,
Here are my experiences flying F5J for the first time.
The first two flights I made my time, but the second one I went over on time and didn’t get my landing points. I was feeling OK at this point. I was launching a little high over 100 meters. I needed to stay under 100. During my second flight I hexed myself as I said this was too easy as everyone was skying out. I should have kept my mouth shut as my 3rd, 4th, and 5th flights were terrible as I was finding lots of sink. Then, I was able to take 2nd on the 7th round and 1st on the 8th round. I believe I was starting to get it. F5J was definitely a learning experience and a lot of fun. I really need to work on reading lower level lift.
I felt bad for Rich S as he had a terrible programming issue with his transmitter, which makes it difficult to compete. He stuck it out with the help of Bill O when I think I might have bowed out.
And I want to thank Wayne for all of his work on running the scoring and timing/audio equipment that went smoothly.
The main reason I wrote this was to let our members know F5J is not as scary as one might think. I’m not one that likes change anymore and was a little intimidated by the rules, but not anymore. It was fun and I look forward to the F5J GSO. If you have been considering it, give it a try even if you only have a CAM.
Dave
Wayne W.
Hi fliers,
Sorry for the delay in getting this contest report put out. When I got home Saturday I was bushed and actually went to bed early. Same story Sunday with two worship services. Monday was just a full day and even though I got my telemetry charts downloaded from my Altis, I just never made it to the keyboard. Excuses, excuses, excuses….
As has been already said, our normal ALES contest for September got hijacked for the F5J version instead. I needed a day to sort out all the F5J support equipment during live contest conditions. It was the first time that I had my clock display out in action since I bought it year before last, and our sound system was all new. The clock turned out to be plug and play with GliderScore, which was a big relief. For sound we went small ball. Instead of big expensive worksite speakers like the other clubs use, we went with pocket size FM/BT radios, with enough for one for every landing tape. In Muncie last week they were using Makita speakers at $180 a pop, Knoxville uses Ryobi speakers at $120 a pop, and Cincy uses someone’s home stereo system for sound. Our little radios were just $25 ea. and I got 10 of them. With the FM transmitter that plugs into the headphone jack on the computer, we were all in for $360, saving us about half what other clubs have been spending. Gotta get on the bus somewhere. I just wanted to be frugal our 1st time out of the box.
Brendan and Dave have already described their flights and their wuda, shuda, cuda-beens, I thought I would show the kind of info that I get from the flight graphs I get from my Altis. Besides giving the altitude readout from the launch portion of the flight for scoring purposes, it also records an altitude trace for the entire flight.
As you can see in my 1st round trace, I took 30 seconds to snoop around for lift during the motor run, I was at 71 meters at motor off, and then took about 45 seconds of hunting before I found some good air. I worked it up to about 110 meters but then I lost it. I spent the next three minutes searching before hooking up with strong lift at about 5:30. Worked that lift up to about 200 meters and with 2 minutes left to go, came in and landed. Time was 9:58 and landing was 30pts. It was a good flight for the start of the day. Good enough for the K. Brendan was close on height at 80 meters but was short on the clock. Bill and Dave overflew on time and lost their landing points. Rich had a good effort for all the travails of having to completely reprogram his Shadow before the contest.
If you peruse over to the GliderScore.com website, you can sift through the rounds and see who had good air and who found the sink. https://gliderscore.com/OnLineScores.aspx
Note: I accidentally uploaded the contest twice to GliderScore. The one with “Sept” in the name is the real one. (I still need to figure out how to delete the other one.)
My strategy was to shoot for about 9:55 on the clock and concentrate on my landings. I had trouble with coming in too high though and would get blown of to the side so my landing scores were quite sporadic. I was launching a lot lower than I normally do on the tour. The light conditions of the day plus Brendan pushing me, got me below 100 meters on launch 6 out of 8 rounds. Watch out for Brendan. He’s picking this F5J stuff up really quick. He used to be really dangerous going downwind. Now that he has a motor and knows that he can get back, watch out!
The first five rounds were pretty much the same. It usually took a minute to a minute and a half to get hooked up with lift. Round three I flew out of it and had to motor up (zero!) but the rest were ok. After round four the lift got pretty strong, and so did the sink. Rounds 5 and 6, I got comfortably high and had an easy time. Rounds 7 and 8 though had killer lift and almost cost me my Berkut. In both of those rounds I launched into lift immediately and was at 700 meters by 5 minutes in. In seven I was able to dive out of it and land comfortably. In round eight however, when I tried to move away from the lift, I actually encountered stronger lift that I could not get away from. At six minutes I was at 730 meters and lost sight of the model for almost a minute. I followed Robert’s advice and immediately gave full flaps and full down, my typical dethermalizing attitude. I tried giving some roll commands to get the wing to give me some flashes. Finally got sight of it again a minute later and brought it down. The graph shows that during that minute, even with the nose pointed straight down, I did not lose any altitude. Killer lift!!!
As I said, this was a shakedown cruise for the big F5J Tour contest next month. Everything worked well, and we were able to put in the full 8 rounds in about 2.5 hours. btw, you might notice that all of Bill’s launch heights were 110M. He was using a regular CAM from ALES contests, so he just took that as a height allowing for a 10M zoom. (won’t be allowed to do that next month. better borrow an Altis…) I was very glad to see him out flying that Volo again. Didn’t look like he had forgotten a thing.
Everyone reported that they really enjoyed the contest and the F5J format. I would really like to see us stick with it. The only real difference from ALES is in the approach to launch strategy, and having to land before the 10 minute window is up. Other than that it is pure fun.
Well, I am off to Knoxville this weekend for the House Mountain Fall F5J contest. Keep an eye on GliderScore.com and root for me. If you check the pilots list you can see that all of the top guns will be there.
Cheers,
Wayne
The Results are in!
Some of Wayne W’s flights
