Contest Website | Contestants | Scores | SPOT Tracking

This morning we were awakened by the ‘Osprey Reveille’ at about 0630, after a whole 5 hours of sleep.  The micro castle is in an RV park more than a mile from the airport, but somehow the noise from the Osprey’s main rotors when they start their testing program in the morning goes all the way across the airport grounds, bounces off the ridgelines a mile more to our east, and then comes right back in the (closed) windows of the micro castle.  Even though I was using earplugs, I still couldn’t sleep through it, so the day got started a little earlier than we had planned.

Speaking of Ospreys, the testing program here consists of a single Osprey, and an entire contingent of engineers, maintenance techs, and other support troops.  It turns out there isn’t a whole lot for these guys to do while the testing is going on, so like bored troops everywhere, they started to think up ways to entertain themselves.  When we were ballasting up the glider this morning, we got to see one result of “too much free time” (see attached photos).  Apparently this is actually the Mark 3 version – we were told by one of the engineers that the engineering prototype failed miserably and had to be redone by the mechanics ;-).

OK, back to reality – I mean soaring ;-).  The weather today was among the best days we have had so far at Logan.  20-30% cloud cover, no over-development or thunder-bumpers, and just enough west-southwest wind to make the ridges work.  The call was another strange one – left me scratching my head for most of the day.  We had a MAT with only one mandatory turnpoint, but with lots of fine print (and I HATE fine print!).  We had to pick from a list of three different turnpoints for our first mandatory turnpoint – one to the  east, one to the north, and one to the west.  If you picked the east turnpoint (Meade Peak), you were more or less committed to the Salt River range (or at least to Wagner Mt).  If you picked the west turnpoint (Sedgewick Peak), you were more or less committed to running the west ridges.  If you picked the north turnpoint (Sherman Mountain) you were more or less committed to running the main ridge.  But wait – there was more fine print – you could only use the Sugar Creek turnpoint (the one between Mink Creek and  Jardine mountain) once, which (almost) eliminated multiple laps up and down the main ridge.  Talk about a programming nightmare – I essentially gave up on pre-programming my ClearNav before launch, waiting to see how the clouds looked before making a decision.  Most pilots elected the north turnpoint and the main ridge for most of the day.  Several pilots chose to strike out to the east, but it mostly did not work out for them.

At the end of the day, everyone got home (a major accomplishment in and of itself!), and local boy Bruno Vassel 4th (B4) won the day with a speed of 77.97, flying a highly modified ASW-20 sporting huge winglets.  After his day win, we were all threatening in jest to protest because he is actually flying an 18m ship, only with the outboard 1.5m on each side pointing up instead of out. ;-).

We have only one day remaining, and it is still anyone’s contest.  Afer 8 contest days including 3 mass landouts, less than 200 points separate the top 5 places.  Tomorrow’s popular weather forecast is for sunny conditions with calm or very light winds from the west, so we will most likely fly again.  Depending on what the tasking brain trust comes up with this time in the Logan game of “stump the pilots”, we could be in for another wild ride.  Stay tuned!

TA.