VSA Race Day #4 - Sat., April 28, 2018

[cjknowles]

VSA Race Day # 4
Saturday, April 28, 2018


The day will start with the usual pilot’s meeting in the morning,
with Cora's coffee cake, of course;

Happy Hour @ 5 PM

Dinner plans to be determined at the pilot's meeting that morning.
(Options include Restaurant, Take Out, or someone to
volunteer, organize, and facilitate
an impromptu BBQ dinner at WSC)

Spend the day soaring (weather permitting)
Before and after flying (or instead of flying if the weather is not so cooperative)
there will be plenty of good food, great company, and lots of stories.

Don’t forget to RSVP for a tow!

by email to noelle@williamssoaring.com
or call the Gliderport at 530-473-5600.

RSVP list as of 4-26-2018 @ 14:55:

Kelly, Peter
Alford, Pat
Pillard, Russ
Wertheimer, Steve

Pilots: 4

[Noelle Mayes]

Surprised only one person has signed up for the Race Day.......

[John Cochrane]

Right now Saturday is looking like the worst day of the weekend and either rainy or overcast. I'd love to hear contrary opinions. Frankly I can't figure out where any of the tasks are, either, and even though there are a ton of them they all end up being not right on a given day.

John Cochrane

[Darryl Ramm]

Ah time for a whine... (and offer of some solutions/help?)

The task management with these race tasks seems like it can be a pain, especially with so many people using ClearNav Navigators that don’t have a way to load tasks from a file or store all the race tasks. Trying to pick tasks in the air from a pre-loaded list in SeeYou Mobile is bad enough, and printouts from SeeYou or similar have difficult or impossible to read waypoint names and task numbers, or impossible to tell from the printout task waypoint ordering. Out of frustration after the first race day this year I started to draw out a cheat sheet with task diagrams that was more abstract but had clear labelling on it than you get just from SeeYou but never finished it... would other folks want something like that?

Instead of task soup, calling a single task may be (or maybe not?) be problematic if the goal is to encourage less experienced XC pilots to participate. There could be a short and long task called each day...

The deeper question is why are people not turning up... the thing to do there is probably to ask people that question, but it’s not clear to me the task complexity has anything to do with the number of people attending.

[John Cochrane]

The format we used at Chicago, to include all skill and glider levels, was pretty simple. Roughly, default task is 2 hour MAT. We gave a bonus for longer tasks, but it's really not necessary. We could make that 3 hour MAT here. People who want to go do lots of kilometers can do it. People who want to stay closer to home can do that. Getting to 1 mile of turnpoints makes it a bit more challenging than just fly where you want. If a group of pilots decided on a better task, including TATs they called it. Again, there was a bonus, but people don't really care about points.

John Cochrane

[Kempton]

Kemp will be there Sat & Sun, but to work on FNX, no flying tho 8^(

[Darryl Ramm]

I'll be there Saturday for dinner and flying Sunday.

[Peter Kelly]

It's race day #4, and it looks flyable, just a question of degrees.
I've been watching the discussions from afar, and had nothing to contribute that would make this race day seem any better.

Discussion by Darryl about flying in the valley and within glide distance of WSC seems to apply today, but there may be some cloud streeting that will allow a few good runs.

We could discuss the sounding, surface winds, lack of any appreciable HCrit, but the cloud cover percent is the most depressing.

All of that said, I plan to fly the ASW24, towing to the nearest good looking cu with a 12:15 ish launch.

Hopefully the pilot meeting will not start before 10:30.

I see a lack of pilot participation on the schedule, but there may be enough for a meeting and a day to compare accomplishments. I'll be there for post flight debrief, but I don't plan to stay for dinner.

See you there - 10:30 ish,

[Peter Kelly]

Pilot meeting conducted by Ben. Launch at 12:04.
Tow to 2,000 ft. Held on during the fast climb.
Took a while to sort out the lift.
Did Task # 5 : 3 Sisters, Gunnersfield, Grimes, 3 Sisters. Landed at 14:41
Total flight time was 2.6 hours. I stayed high all day.
Good day to fly.

my flight log...

[Noelle Mayes]

Congratulations Race Day #4 Winner Pat Alford!