This past weekend, I joined a couple other of my RC soaring friends from LASS, and headed down to Wilson, North Carolina for the 2004 East Coast HLG Festival. Recently I picked up well-used discus-launched glider from a club mate, and by gum I was going to compete this year! Below is a recounted of this weekend wherein I managed to win my first trophy for soaring, a third place in the “sportsman” class competition. Click on “read more” to see the full story…

note: Yeah, I know I didn’t take any photos. I managed to mess up and delete a bunch, but luckily Peter Jensen should be posting a big bunch very soon.

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David Gruneisen wrote:
> How did it go?

It went very well!

We stopped off in Raleigh on Friday to see Bruce’s buddy who has a 10,000 gallon saltwater aquarium in his house in the suburbs — AMAZING! He apparently had some calamity a couple months back involving his aquarium maintainer dumping a shitload of tap water into his tank while he was on vacation, so there was algae all over the place. Not that a layperson like I would really even notice such things, but it was clear he was professionally ashamed. His “pump room” was quite impressive. We later went to a local ale-house/sports bar thing for dinner. He spoke of dive trips to the Great Barrier Reef, Indonesia and the Phillipines.

We drove on down to Wilson, N.C. to the hotel, checked in and made some last-minute repairs.

Saturday morning we arrive bright and early at the field, which was bordered by a harvested cotton field on the left and rear, and soybeans on the right, with a treeline off in the distance if you stood facing forward. It was around 50 degrees, but the air was pretty still. I put my plane together to trim it out in this nice air, grab my frequency pin off the board, and after a couple of launches, I began getting radio interference! From about 10-15 feet she takes an inverted nose-dive into the ground. The boom has cracked near the fuselage! Oh no! I turn around to find that he who shot me down was none other than Phil Barnes — the maker of the wings that Bruce and I (and many others) fly on. Phil (as he would show later) is a terribly helpful guy, and immediately starts helping me repair with some carbon. Luckily, the cracks are just longitudinal cracks, and the repair goes smoothly.

The other competitors have begun to arrive for the 9AM pilots meeting, and shortly the contest gets underway. They make the announcement that they will be giving away 1st, 2nd, and 3rd places trophies for “sportsman” class entrants as well! Cool. There turned out to be 10 sportsman entrants, most of which hadn’t flown an HLG contest yet. There are 26 pilots, and there are going to be 12 rounds (8 Saturday, 4 on Sunday) with 3 heats of about 9 pilots a piece. Each round is a different “task”. The first round task was “Total time – 2 minute flights max”, and scoring is always how many seconds you were “in flight”. So there is a possible 600 points per round. However, with the 2 minute max flight time, a little time will be wasted in the transition from landing to re-launch (or “relight” as it is known). Bruce claims the the good people can do it in around 2 seconds, so optimally you could see something like 594 seconds being scored. Each heat is scored individually (called “man-on-man” style, so the person (or people) with the top score(s) in each heat get 1000 points, and everyone else is prorated from that score. This is helpful because the lift comes and goes quite often in a contest, so it wouldn’t be fair to the folks in later/earlier heats. So anyway, I managed to score 964 points out of 1000, meaning I did 96.4% as well as the top scorers in my heat.

The next round was 5 longest flights, 2 minutes max. You could launch as many times as you wanted, and the top 5 counted towards your total. You could fly OVER 2 minutes, but you’d only get 2 minutes worth of points. Towards the end of the round, with about 1:30 to go, and lift in the air, I managed to cartwheel my plane a little, and the boom re-broke in the same area we had fixed! Bummer!

Now it’s got a small radial crack in it, so I go and get MORE uni-directional carbon from Phil, re-wrap that area, apply it with thin CA and kicker to harden, then I put some .75oz fiberglass cloth on it and CA/kicker it, and then wrap that area with some kevlar fishing line, and more CA/kicker! By god, if it breaks now, it won’t be from lack of trying. Unfortunately, I had to stay out of round 3 (five 3-minute flights), and drew a zero for that round. Lunch was up next, and I finished up my repairs and had the tastiest of NC BBQ for lunch. I finished up lunch and tested out my repairs. I throw easy at first, and then as hard as I can. Looks GREAT! WTF! One of my wing servos has decided to start messing up! What the hell? Ah well, I had been flying my beater wing anyway. I had fixed up another wing (one of Bruce’s cast offs), and it had two good servos in it, thankfully. It was nice and clean (compared to the beater), and I was getting better hang times and launches out of it. The fourth round (Three 3-minute flights and 1 one-minute flight in any order) comes, and I roar out of the gate with 966.9 points! I was one of only 8 of the pilots to score above 900 in that round. Woo-hoo. I’m back, baby! The repair manages to stick together for the rest of the day, and I’m pretty happy.

Meanwhile, while all of this is going on, Brian Kopke has been flying and timing along with me, and his Art Hobby Hyper DL is just getting punished! First he breaks the throwing peg out of the wing, which we quickly repaired with CA and carbon fiber, and then another break in the rudder, and another, etc, etc. He manages to patch it all back together, and flies in every round, battling through adversity! For a plane he had never flown before Saturday (his first soaring contest), he’s doing just fine, and really making the effort.

Oh, Phil later tells me that if send Denny (who assembles the XP4 DLGs, like I fly) my address, he’ll send me a new wing. Denny also tells me he has some leftover pods as well, so I’m going to end up with some loot out of the whole deal. My whole rig really isn’t worth a new wing anyway, so that goes to show you how supportive these guys are.

The first day comes to an end, some Negro Modelos are passed around, and some guys throw together their Pocket Combat Wings (http://www.edgerc.com/pcw.htm) and start trying to limbo under the tents near the pits, flying no more than six feet away from me as I sit in a camp chair. Many crashes ensue, with much hilarity. Then someone whips out a Pocket Combat wing with a CD-ROM motor on it. HOLY SHIT. Pure unlimited vertical performance on this little wing. It was INSANE. BAT-SHIT INSANE. The motor winding kit is something like $20 but he can crank out 38,000 RPMs and pulls 10 amps out of an 850mah LiPo 3-cell pack. It was CRANKING. The Pocket Combat Wings were no slouches either, but they certainly didn’t have the vertical performance of that wing w/ the CD-ROM motor. Later hilarity ensued as Phil Barnes lowered the tent they were flying under, causing the pilot to lose the plane into a large (50 ft) holly tree. Phil, again feeling bad (“I break it, I fix it!”) bounds up this holly tree and shakes the wing down. He might be a plane-wrecker, but he’s a generous and nice one at that :)

We ate at the most bizarre restaurant in which I have ever eaten that night. It’s called “Griff’s Steak Barn”. It doesn’t actually look like a barn, in fact I think it may have been a bank at some point. The waiters are all dressed in black and white, and they have a wood-paneled coat-check and little butter mints on the counter and a nice marble foyer, but the rest of the restaurant reminds me of that bizarre “Friendly’s” place that used to be in Oxmoor mall. It’s all sort of this wild steamboat sort of decoration, with a room that appears to have been a vault at some point. It feels very old, but with many, many coats of paint. We were filed past many, many rooms and put into one in the rear. There was an Ale8One sign above the door with their old slogan “It Glorifies!”. It was strange. The steak was shitty and undercooked for medium-rare. It was just strange.

Sunday came, and we headed back out to the field to complete the remaining four rounds. It was cool and VERY calm, and some guys are taking advantage of the time to trim their planes in the deadest of dead air. Phil Barnes gets 2 minutes 5 seconds in dead air, and his launches are SUPER high. Bruce trims his plane and gets a little over 2 minutes after about 4 flights with successively more and more up elevator. Me, I was only managing 1:10s or 1:20s or so. Trimming is done, and the pilot meeting is held, and then the rain comes! I’ve never flown in the rain before, but safe to say this foam wings with the porous kevlar skins start taking on some water here and there, and my balsa tail surfaces are probably getting a little heavy. The first round is a real meat-grinder. It’s a “ladder” task of 1:10, 1:20, 1:30, 1:40, 1:50, and 2:00 minute flights you HAVE to make at least the first flight to move onto the second. So, if you have a 1:05 flight, SORRY! You had to make at least 70 seconds to move onto the 80 second task. I managed to eek out a 1:10 and 1:20, by the 1:30 flight, I was just too heavy, and there was so little lift. This is truly were the launch-height comes in REAL handy.

I finished out the other three rounds with respectable sportsman-class scores of a 717, 700 and a 698 (I’m consistently mediocre!)

At lunch they had a raffle for a JR-6102 radio, a Taboo DLG kit, and an XP-4 DLG kit, along with some servos and a couple of Allegro carbon tailbooms from tailbooms.com. The radio actually goes to contest director Dick Proseus, and the two kits go to two others whom I don’t remember. Both Bruce and Brian get some tailbooms, and I get two worthless raffle tickets :)

Then the top six out of the whole bunch fly in 3 fly-off rounds. Phil Barnes is in first place leading Bruce in second by about 100 points. The contest director, Dick Proseus makes it into the finals, but shortly before the fly-offs, he and Phil Barnes have a mid-air 6 feet off the ground, which knocks Dick’s elevator clean off! He quickly runs back to get another plane, and returns shortly. I time for Bruce, and to tell you the truth, I was a bit nervous! I mean, I’ve got to act like the eyes in the back of the head of the Nat’l champ here, and make sure I don’t mess up the timing. All of the fly-off tasks were limited-throw tasks, like 5 longest flights, 2 minute max, max five throws. Phil and Bruce duked it out for top honors, neither giving an inch. Adam “Red” Weston (past-maker of the Red Herring, and who now makes the Maple Leaf Encore DLG), who flew in from Seattle makes a good charge from fourth place into third with some daring flying.

In the end, Bruce only managed to make up 6 points on Phil, who ended up winning the contest. Red Weston managed to take in 3rd place by winning two of the 3 fly-off rounds, Dick Proseus made 4 places, reformed sloper Spencer Lisenby came in 5th, and Shane Spikler ended up in 6th.

So, as far as the “sportsman” class goes, Adam Propst gets first with 9526 points, Charles Frey had 8709 points and I have 8137 points for third. If only I hadn’t dropped that third round!It was a pretty high-scoring round for all involved, I think the average was around 900 points. So maybe I would have at 9037 points, who knows! In any case, I’m crazy happy about attending the contest, and am looking forward to many more in my future. I got a nice big glass mug etched with the LSF logo, and “DESS HLG 2004″ on it and a 3rd place ribbon.

We made a hasty retreat after the contest ended (about 3:30), and it took us about 9 1/2 hours to get back home. Whew. Lots of fun, lots of great people, and a big learning experience. Yee-haw!