Official practice
Sound emission check
Me and my team members arrived at the second airfield at 7:00am this morning to prepare for our official practice slot. This year, each team member would be allotted 15 minutes practice time on the official field. Our team was the first to practice on flight line 2, so me and my pilots spent our timeslot accordingly in the flight line. At the official practice, each machine had to be checked for noise emission level, and if its over 90db then the machine would be disqualified for use. Luckily all our machines passed the test. The wind condition during our practice time was real bad, which was not encountered during the days we were here. All my fliers had a very hard time performing maneuvers due to the very strong wind. We pray for better wind condition tomorrow.
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Official practice |
Sound emission check |
Like I mentioned in the previous day's page, this year the World Championship would operate two flight lines instead of the usual one. The main objective of this was to try to ease the judges' workload when doing their job for preliminaries. Due to this, all pilots were being divided into two groups, A & B, and each group of pilots would alternate between the two flight lines and judges by day. According to the AMA officials, flight line 1 was used only for the preliminaries, and flight line 2 would be used for both preliminaries and final. Both flight lines were being setup facing the same direction, with flight line 2 flying parallel to flight line 1. However, after I checked out the two flight lines, I found that flight line 1 had a all facilities like spectator stands, hard top covered hangars, pay phones, and even a soda machine, while flight line 2 had nothing other than make shift tents. I wondered why AMA did not use flight line 1 for the finals.
According to the schedule, group A should have the most attention because they had the Canada, France, Italy, Japanese and USA team. The Hong Kong team was in group B, and in our group the strongest competitor should come from Argentina, Austria, Korea, Germany, UK and Switzerland team which also had great pilots too. However, due to the dual flight line operation, it mean that I have to go back and forth between the two flight lines to see the famous pilots competing. What an inconvenience!
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Flight line 1 |
Flight line 1 |
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Flight line 2 |
Flight line 2 |
After the official practice, our team went to have our machines and radios being checked and processed. AMA officials were very helpful and diligent in doing this to make sure that all machines used in the competition were straightly in accordance to the rule. During this process, we met the USA team in the processing area, and get to check out their machines.
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Machine processing office |
Curtis Youngblood's JR Vigor CS in processing |
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Curtis Youngblood's JR Vigor CS |
Wayne Mann's Kyosho Caliber |
After the official practice and machines processing for all team ended, there was an opening ceremony being held. Each team assemble in flight line 2, and a simple ceremony was held to officially introduce each team and start the competition.
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Teams with their national flag assembled |
Speech by AMA director to address teams |
After the ceremony, all pilots and team members were invited to a barbecue party graciously sponsored by Mr. Masuda of R/C Technique magazine. The party had barbecue food, drinks and live music, where everyone could enjoy the night. Me and my team members were all too old for rock music so we quickly finished our meal and went back to the hotel to rest. It would be a early morning start for tomorrow because radio impound start 6:00am and one of our pilot was placed as the second flyer in the schedule.
