2013 Senior Nationals, Day 3

Seminole Gliderport, Clermont, Florida USA, March 13, 2013

I’m up early this morning, watching the sky lighten to the east.  Glider trailers are just starting to come into view out the window.  I want to get  my glider assembled and down to the grid early today, as BZ and I are at the very back of the 60-glider grid.

A rules committee ‘town meeting’ was hosted last night by Ken Sorenson.  I’m used to these meetings rapidly dissolving into name-calling and near-fights,  so I had brought my popcorn and my movie guide and I was all set for an entertaining hour or so, but nothing really happened. The whole thing was rather quiet and subdued – what a bummer! ;-).  The major points of discussion were Flarm and the new rule for 2013 allowing for pilot-pilot communication for the purpose of team flying.

Regarding Flarm, the comments I remembered from the discussion were something like

  • Flarm works and has already been credited with multiple collision ‘saves’ by almost every pilot in the meeting
  • Flarm usage will ‘ruin competitive soaring as we know it, turning glider racing into a computer game’
  • Flarm ‘will increase the heads-down time even more than now’ (the implication being, I think, that it will *decrease* safety – hard to credit this one in view of the first item above).
  • Too expensive and too poorly supported/documented by Flarm compared to the relatively cheaper European Flarm units.

At the end of the Flarm discussion, one of the attendees asked for a show of hands on the following question – “Who at this meeting would vote AGAINST making Flarm mandatory at SSA-sanctioned contests, assuming easy availability of Flarm rental units?”.  Of the twenty or so pilots at the meeting, there was only one hand raised, and even that pilot acknowledged that the easy availability of Flarm rental units might change his vote from AGAINST to FOR.  While I’m on this subject, I hereby put in my  vote for sainthood for Noelle & Rex Mays and the entire staff of Williams Soaring of Williams, Ca.  These guys run the Flarm rental program, undoubtedly the single greatest safety improvement for soaring since the invention of the parachute.  And they do it at what has to be cost or below-cost to them.  Glider pilots can arrange for a portable PowerFlarm for the entire duration of any U.S. contest for $50 U.S., including shipping in both directions!!  THANK YOU WILLIAMS SOARING!!!

At the morning meeting, dashing (I’ve been told I need to find a new adjective each day) weatherman Richard Kellerman gave us the news that we could expect good lift to maybe 5000′ later in the day, but it would be BLUE and the winds would be high enough to make thermalling in the ‘good lift’ somewhat problematic.  By grid time, it was totally blue in all quadrants except for some small bands of thin high cirrus wafting through from west to east.  A sniffer (Rob Cluxton in 1K) was thrown up and he stuck, but just barely.  He was seen to be working broken lift int he 1500′ category for quite a while, until he found a ‘boomer’ (1.5kt) to 2000′ msl.  This caused CD John Good to move the launch back a couple of times, but finally the launch proper started about 1:00pm.  BZ and I were gridded way in the back of the bus, so we didn’t even hear a rumor about a launch until it had been going for a while, and then all of a sudden we heard a noise that wasn’t quite kosher in a glider environment.  When we looked up toward the front of the grid, what we saw was a towplane on its back, and a bunch of people running in that direction.  There are lots of rumors and speculation (and some really wide-eyed eye-witnesses in the first few gliders waiting to be towed), but all we know for sure is that the pilot escaped with very minor injuries and the towplane looks to be very much worse for wear.  CM Richard Owens has asked me to leave the task of putting the official report to the professionals, so I will just end the description here.

Needless to say, the launch was cancelled immediately, and it soon became apparent that it wasn’t going to be possible to re-start it due to the presence of police and emergency equipment.  The day was cancelled, and we all started the process of unwinding the grid and getting everyone back to their trailers.  For us at the back of the bus, this took another hour or so, but what else did we have to do?

John Mittell (BZ) and Jim Garrison (T) and I drowned our sorrows (and our appetites) at the ‘Gators’ burger/beer restaurant on rt 27 and we all hoped for a better day tomorrow.  Hopefully the high northerly winds will abate a bit and maybe we’ll even see some clouds sometime before the end of the contest ;-).

Stay tuned,

Frank (TA)

PS:  I write about soaring and soaring contests because soaring is the nearest any of us poor humans (with the possible exception of Karl Striedieck) can ever come to being a hawk or an eagle, and I like sharing my personal experiences and perceptions with others who might not get to as many contests as I do, or might not fly contests at all but like hearing about the sport and whatever adventures or mis-adventures I might be into at the moment.  I have been encouraged by many readers who have enjoyed my efforts, and I would like to thank all of you who have written to tell me so.  I plan to continue to post my personal opinions here at Soaring Cafe as long as Bill Elliot and Rand Baldwin allow, and if I get kicked off of this site, I’ll create my own blog or just put them on R.A.S.  In other words, I’m not going to stop saying what I think and feel and experience, and I sincerely hope most readers appreciate this.  I have caught a lot of flak lately for my ‘Rest Day’ post, where I bitched about the decision of the SSA ExComm to put Hawke Tracking out of business (full disclosure – Mark Hawkins and I started, ran, and were the entire staff of Hawke Tracking.  We charged exorbitant rates for our SPOT tracking service, and took every opportunity to extract oodles of money from contest pilots.  In the end, we had just about enough money to pay for the servers we used, but not enough for the internet bandwidth or the electricity bill), and the decision by someone at SSA to copy my personal blog posts to the SSA contest site without my permission.  These comments are, like everything I write, my own personal opinions and should be taken by all readers with several tons of salt.  I am a misguided, mentally unbalanced soaring lunatic, and would have long since been confined to an insane asylum if it weren’t for the fact that (for the moment at least) free speech and cross-country soaring are still legal in the USA.  I try to pepper my posts with a few facts here and there to keep folks guessing, but stuff I write is often entirely the product of my overly fevered imagination and may have only the remotest connection to reality.  If you don’t like my writing style or my opinions, you are free to stop reading – or at least to stop copying them to the SSA contest site (without my permission) AND THEN bitching about them! ;-).

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