The FAA have been a constant presence at Uvalde checking that the pilots have the correct documents to fly safely. At one stage we had 11 officials here for 99 pilots, quite a high ratio I think.
At briefing yesterday Ken told us that he had calculated that so far during the contest pilots have flown in excess of 40,000km which is the circumference of the earth and by the end of the contest we will probably have flown to the moon.
I wrote down some other tug nick names yesterday : Sweet Pea, Red Baron, Baby Blue, Killer Shark, Yellow Peril, Yellow Jacket. There are 11 altogether so I’m still missing a few.
David had a relight on day 5 due to a blocked ASI. He called on the radio, we had the crew waiting when he landed, someone grabbed his wing as he slowed, the offending tube was cleared out (Polish is suspected) and he was relaunched in 5 mins with out getting out of his glider. We certainly have the A team working for us here.
The finish yesterday was amazing. At 5.30pm our gliders all had over 200km to fly on task, the sky was grey with spread out from the storms up north and we had strong winds from the associated gust front. The 15m guys initially planned to land 40km out at the Batesville airfield. The crew were sent off with the trailers to meet them. Then we had a call that they had found a 5kt climb on the gust front and were now heading for Uvalde. We recalled the crew to the grid. As the time ticked by and it got darker we called the pilots to tell them that they had to be on the ground by the end of legal daylight at 20.23 or they would get a penalty. It’s the first time as a Captain that I have told a pilot to land to get a better score. (The penalty is 10pts per minute). As the minutes passed it became clear that whilst they might be able to squeak into the airfield at Uvalde a paddock was the safest option. The trailers were re-hitched and the crews set off again. They landed safely 5km away. Whilst they crossed the finish ring 15km away and clearly finished the task they were below the minimum finish height (3000′ minimum with a penalty for the first 100m low then an outlanding at the ring) so received distance points rather than speed points.