In summary Day 9 proved to be a little lesson in Team Management, some things I got right and others I barely got away with!
We hardly needed to rush down to the airfield: 10:30am was the scheduled start time so a relaxed breakfast and a diversion enroute to pick up gallons of water and a few bites for lunch.
- WRONG!
- 10:30am was the time flying was scheduled to start!
- Would have been better to get to the airfield at 9:30am
- I've been through my library of excuses and found a few that'll fit, these will go into my official report
This caught us right off guard, we got a sense for this as we approached the airfield because, from main road (~5mins away), we could see that the judges gazebo and judges were assembled ready to judge. We quickly formulated a plan, as soon as the handbrake was applied we rapidly disembarked and headed off in different directions. The rendezvous point was the GBR pit tables in the main hanger, collating information we realised that we had ~30mins before our flying slots. This sounds fine but our pit tables are right at the back of the hanger and the flight line is several hundred meters away from the main hanger and models need to be transported there via a towed trailer - the route is across sun-bleached grass and temperature in the shade is usually 33°C.
By the skin of our teeth we had Nigel on the flight line ready for the judges on time. His flight was pretty good, the speed was better than the previous evening's flight, but a few minor faults had crept in. Mat was up next and we had a mix up with the flight schedules, ultimately this is down to me but, again, I've rootled around in my excuse draw and found an exact fit! This, never-the-less, impacted on Mat's flight scores but, as we were out of the running and efforts by the organisers had got us the flights the night before, we decided it was best to take it on the chin.
Next up was Danny in F4B, a real chance of a GBR podium. The results and placings after round 2 were posted, the gold medal place was already decided but the following 4 places were definitely up for grabs! Danny found himself in the somewhat stressful position of being in a tentative second place with it all to lose! The final round is run in reverse order of the current official standings which meant we would be up second from last so a good opportunity to see how the others faired. Danny did a great of settling himself down for the final flight and, aside from a moderately serious fault on one manoeuvre, he put in an excellent flight. We got the result from the flight and it was an excellent score despite the penalty from the fault. With flight scores normalised for each round is not possible to gauge the final result from one score alone we won't the final result until tomorrow.
Brian Seymour, GBR F4 Team Manager