Aeros Winter Race 2014 - conclusion

This years Aeros Winter Race started in kind of a turbulent way, when we had to change the primary decision due to logistic/political and other problems Aeros had to face just before the competition. Later on we had a great luck with the weather and everything sorted out at the end - which reminds me again that pilots belong to the sky - if they can fly, there is no problem at all - sportsmanship rules.

The Vipava valley again showed us that it has a mind and weather of it's own, that available weather forecasts for that small part of Slovenia are just barely valid.

It was great to see "old crows" like Oleg Bondarchuk, Robert Reisinger and others are still very competitive and can fly on the top level, graceful as ever.

We can only say: "See you all next year!"

Photo by: Polona Ježek

Forecast comes true

After party last night we woke up in to the overcasted morning. Finally the forecast is kind of accurate. There will be no task today. The prize giving will happend at competition office, at the very hospital pizzerja Anja, at 10 am.
Here are some pictures from yesterdays party:

Tom wins the day 3!

The day 3 results are out. Tom Weissenberger outrunning everybody for 3 minutes, followed by slovenian Matjaz Klemencic and german Roland Wöhrle. In the overall standings Tom took the lead, Oleg and Seppi are following on second and third place.
Tomorrow still looks like rain right now so will see what happens...

Finnaly fairly long task!

The weather today showed a lot of SW wind. We came up with 112 km long task, but some pilots had some safety concerns due to strong wind. The safety commitee had decided to make the cylinder radius bigger to make sure pilots were on the save side. This delay turned out to be a big mistake, becouse wind got to strong on take off for everybody to launch - the winds died down in 30 minutes but a lot of pilots decided not to fly already, there was still plenty of time until the launch window closing.
The others enjoyed smooth flight on the 90 km long task, with Tom Weissenberger first in goal.
We will see what will happened tomorrow, right now it seems like rainy day.

Day 3

Today we go to the Kovk again. The forecast is for stronger WSW winds. At the evening we will have a dinner/party for pilots at Tourist farm Birsa starting at 8pm. The exact location is shown on their web site.

Results of day 2, Seppi wins the day

The today results are out. The winner, Seppi, wins the day racing around the course in 52 minutes. Overall results shows two leaders with exactly same points, Oleg and Seppi, are tied at 916 points.

Task 2, weather, weather

Yes, we did it again. We set the task all wrong again. Forecast showed stable conditions, no clouds on the sky - at least at the time of task setting - but the weather turned on as the task begun and our 54 km was way underestimated. Anyway we have a lot of pilots in goal and this is also nice to see.