Asia Pacific Open F3K contest report

This past weekend was the Asia Pacific Open F3K event, the third APO. This contest is a team event for the Asian and Pacific countries, held this year in Singapore and hosted by the Soaring Association of Singapore. They did an outstanding job in organizing and running the event. Getting used to the weather was a bit difficult for those of us that came from the southern hemisphere winter, the 32C and higher temps, with the high humidity took a while to get used to!

Why am I posting this on the Snipe2 thread? Well, the New Zealand team flew Snipe2 aircraft. All of us had the same evaluation in regards to the improved launch height of the Snipe2, as well as the benign handling and good flight performance. We flew a total of 15 preliminary rounds, and the three NZ team members finished 1, 2, 3, with a rather good point margin. See the preliminary round scores http://f3xvault.com/?action=event&fu…&event_id=1326 One thing to note here is that we had a very wide variety of conditions during the three days of preliminary rounds, with some rounds having zero lift and zero wind, some rounds with very active lift, and some rounds with very punishing winds and horrific sink due to the outflow from a nearby thunderstorm. We had the rather full range of flying conditions during the contest, and we were all quite happy that we had a plane that could deliver excellent performance throughout the full range of conditions. It was clear that some of the aircraft were optimized for performance for only a subset of full range of conditions that we experienced in the preliminary rounds.

Now, the flyoff rounds… Shortly after the preliminary rounds completed, the wind started to pick up a bit, and the lift got a bit more scarce. The contest director held a fun, and also very competitive, event prior to the start of the flyoffs. He declared an all up last down event for all pilots that were not in the flyoffs, with beer as a prize for the top three pilots. This event showed the brutality of the punishing sink on the field, as the first launch sorted out the pilots. The initial idea was that if a pilot landed before the end of the 3 minute slot, they would be finished with the event continuing until there was only three pilots left. Well, nobody even got close to three minutes! I think the best of the pilots made it to just over 2 minutes with most less than one minute. The wind was only a small factor as it was maybe 4-5 m/s. Shortly after this, the flyoffs started, with 3×3:20. I had marked some air in the one minute flight test period prior to the start. So, I launched and headed to where I thought it would drift. Turned out that I was completely wrong, and did a 40 second flight! Fortunately, that was my only real mistake for the entire six rounds of the flyoffs, and ended up finishing with over 500 pts margin over the 2nd placed pilot. Scores are here: http://f3xvault.com/?action=event&fu…&event_id=1342 I ended up dropping just over 100 points in the six round flyoff, with the second place pilot dropping more than 600 points and the third place pilot down around 1k points. Brutal conditions, with some big lift, a lot of big sink, and even the occasional eagle that really didn’t like Snipe2 aircraft. On the 2:30 flight of the big ladder, an eagle locked onto my plane and tried to attack for almost a full minute. I used up a lot of altitude trying to run from the eagle, then decided to go on offense as defense just wasn’t working. It took a while, but I finally pulled a few looping attacks that got the eagle to consider easier prey… fortunately I had really hooked up well in a strong thermal so I had enough excess energy to do this!

I credit the large performance range of the Snipe2 as well as the excellent launch for my performance in the flyoffs. The Snipe2 allowed me to range very far away when needed to get away from sink and into good air, and also allowed me to hang in the very light air when that was necessary. This contest wasn’t at all about fluffy air and turnaround performance, but instead about performance in very challenging conditions. Thanks Vladimir!