09/09/2001 Day 1 Competition (Schedule A)

Me and my team members arrived at the second airfield at 6:00am this morning to prepare for radio impound.  The first pilot to fly in our team would fly as second pilot amongst the whole group.  Before the competition, demo flights by both Dwight Shilling and Wendle Atkins were flown before the ten judges.  Right after the demo flight, it started raining heavily.  As a result, the competition had to postpone till rain stop.  Me and my team wait until around 12:00am today to resume competition.  Due to the delay, the competition was held non-stop, just breaking in two hours' interval for about ten minutes and continue, no lunch break.  This sure made the judge's work much harder, cause they would have to perform their work non-stop, with empty stomach.  The wind condition had been crazy for the whole day, so most pilots did not score great points.  Due to my pilot's schedule, I could not go to the other field to see performance by other great pilots like the Canada, France, Italy, Japan and USA team.  However, in our group there were also the Argentina, Austria, Korea, Germany, UK and Switzerland team which also had great pilots too, and their performance, even at adverse weather condition, were marvelous.

The sky stayed dull with heavy winds for most of the day, until the very last pilot who had to fly during rain.  I felt bad for the judges because after working for the whole day they still had to do their job in rain, with an empty stomach.  The judge area did not have any shelter so all judges were soaked wet after judging for the last pilot of the day.  After today's competition, heavy rain poured.  Below were the top 10 results for today for each group:

Normalized scores would not be out until tomorrow when group B fly in flight line 1 tomorrow.  The normalized score calculation for each round would be calculated when each group go to the other flight line to complete the whole lineup.  Its quite complicated, and if its not Dave Seller's very detailed explanation of score calculation with me I would not know how they would come out.

Judging from the results by group, group A had the most top scored pilots, but with a great score variance between the top and bottom scored pilot.  Group B's pilot results were more level.

The surprise was that defending World Champion Mr. Hashimoto was not even amongst top ten in his flight group.  According to some who witness Mr. Hashimoto's flight, he had to fly his helicopter during the heaviest wind condition of the day.  Hirobo staff said there was problem with his machine and it took them till 2:00am yesterday night to fix it and since they could not test fly the machine they did not know if it worked 100%, so led to Hashimoto's bad flight.  I guess it should be a very long night for Hirobo team tonight.

Rain in the morning	Rain in the morning
Dull and windy weather the whole day	Last pilot of the day had to fly in rain

I was exhausted arriving my room after dinner, tomorrow its going to be another long day.

Interesting machine of the day

Johann Hoenle of Germany was flying with Kyosho Caliber.  His machine had several interesting parts.  Johann modified the rotor head and made a longer than stock main shaft which according to him provide better hovering characteristics.  In addition, Johann also used a special gyro that had engine governor function incorporated.  The piezo element of this gyro was said to be stay constant at a certain temperature to prevent drift.  Johann scored amongst the highest amongst group B.

Johann's gyro with lots of wire connections	Johann's self made main shaft and rotor head parts

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