Early start this morning and a late finish! Thanks to the local bank holiday flying started at 8:00am with the last flights of F4C round 1. Also scheduled for 8:00am, and the reason for our early arrival, was the F4B (control line) meeting and with Danny competing in F4B we needed to be there. The meeting wasn't particularly taxing and was more-or-less to outline the order of events and agree procedures, one of which was the dreaded pull test. Now, for those of us in the know, this is possibly the most fraught part of flying F4B, it involves the competitor holding their model whilst someone applies a high force on the control handle to test the load carrying capabilities of the handle, line, and bell-crank. Models in other control line classes aren't built as delicately as F4B models so it is perhaps less of an issue but the potential for damage to an F4B model is petrifying! Fortunately the protocol decided upon was that the pilot's assistant would perform the pull test under supervision of an official, this was a great relief to each and every competitor.
In F4H we were still at the beck and call of a convenient time slot to have our much anticipated first World Championship flights. This delay turned out to be rather handy as I could concentrate on being flight assistant for Danny.
F4B flying commenced an hour or so after the meeting which was plenty of time to get prepared and we were second to fly, originally third but one of our fellow competitors cashed his model in practice the previous evening. On with our flight... and I don't know whether I was more nervous than Danny as I really didn't want to cause any disadvantage to Danny with a silly mistake but Danny briefed me very well and, with a great tip from Cathy of the American team on how to combat dizziness, I managed to avoid causing Danny any issues - or maybe it was despite me 😀
All this saw round 1 end with Danny in a very close second place. The second round was in the afternoon and Danny put in really nice flight, it looked butter smooth from my seat! The official scores however only showed a modest improvement and with no update on the overall standings it really is all to play for in the final round 🙂.
Just as Danny's flight finished we received confirmation that Mat and Nigel would get their first flights of the competition after the F4C round. Talk about excited and nervous energy, not even the sun (now a bright feature at 45° left of centre) was going to spoil our day! The judges gave us leeway to centre manoeuvres away from the sun so Nigel, flying before Mat, took the option for a downwind (~3mph) take-off and a different manoeuvre centre for the descending circle. Nigel put in a rather good flight, I'll probably be proved wrong but I reckon it was good for 2,600 points - I'll let you know how close I was tomorrow 😊. By the time we got to Mat's fight the sun's brightness was nicely attenuated by misty clouds in the distance so no changes or leeway were needed. That's not to say Mat had a walk in the park, the colour scheme on his model made it a perfect silhouette for most of the flight, despite this, Mat put in a solid performance with a nice take-off, and the landing would have been a peach if it weren't for the model tracking off-centre just as she came to a standstill.
In summary, Danny is in with a very good chance of Gold and I'll leave speculation on Mat and Nigel's chances for another day 😁
Brian Seymour, GBR F4 Team Manager
