2012  DARTS Unlimited Contest    Sunday, June 24,  2012   -   Results 



The group shot of pilots: Don Harris, Ken Rice, Dave Rice, Paul Weise, Albert Salas, Jerry Shape, Bill Hoelcher, Chip Willis, Ron Mong and Norm Poti.  These guys are chilling it in the shade! Must have been a hot day

It was a surprisingly beautiful and yet challenging day to fly sailplanes at Twin Towers Park near Dayton today. We had 11 competitors test their skills at finding lift and finding the landing spot. The wind picking up later in the afternoon never arrived until I left around 6 pm, so we had light and variable winds and partly cloudy skies all day. Very pleasant and yet surprisingly weak lift as often as not. Because everything was so slow moving there were times when the whole field seemed to be full of sink. Then again, with flight groups of 3 and 4 people we often ended up with only or 1 or 2 spots in the sky explored so it's a little hard to say. We also were running the winch lines about the shortest way we could and therefore you might only have 2 minutes or less of search time before you found lift or somebody you could poach lift from. There were many, many flight groups where a couple guys would search out one and not hook much when someone making a slightly different call was in decent air. As a result many people's scores got hammered down. In fact, even our winner didn't max every flight task of 10 minutes. That fellow was none other than Jerry Shape who flew his Aspire extremely well all day and found the hot end of the tape without trouble too. Jerry was followed by Ron Mong in 2nd flying his Espada RL even though there was some damage inflicted by Jerry and a certain bad CD. Coming in close behind Ron was Paul Wiese who claimed 3rd place with some funny frequency he says is made from HAM while flying his Pike Superior. Congratulations guys, you deserve it!

From the CD's perspective I thought everyone behaved most excellently. We didn't break any planes or anything on the ground, by just talking to the horse people in the morning we quickly avoided a conflict with those sharing the park, and I experienced the joy of holding a sanctioned contest (there is more paper work than I'm used to). We did not apply a no-pop off rule and we did have one or two relaunches and quick winch changes when parachutes landed on a line. I managed to ball up the line on one winch by telling someone to tap it down but this was after they launched safely so I experienced the joy of untangling. Overall, by having 6 winches out and only 4 people max per flight group this helped things run smoothly. From my personal experience flying today I felt reluctance to fly so I could concentrate on scoring and because I was still recovering from thermal psychosis at the MOSS after six Jim Clark Memorial the night before (but that's another story). So I had no pressure on myself and probably as a result I flew OK. Good enough to take the lead going into round 4 which of course I was aware of since I was scoring. Probably due to nerves I flew the Pike as if it was inverted and filled with depleted uranium. That was good enough for about a 2 minute flight, oh and I landed off field doing an impromptu Carbon vs Very Small Sapling crash test. The Carbon won thankfully, the sapling left some green smudges on the leading edge and nothing else. The next round I was back to the previous form and got a max and a landing so I guess it was just temporary insanity that plagued me.

Skye

Summary of results: see below for the detailed results

place	pilot	score	normalized score
1	Jerry Shape	6,527.66	1,000.00
2	Ron Mong	5,827.88	892.80
3	Paul Wiese	5,649.61	865.49
4	Don Harris	5,542.72	849.11
5	Skye Malcolm	5,415.60	829.64
6	Chip Willis	5,386.80	825.23
7	Bill Hoelcher	5,264.42	806.48
8	Norman Poti	5,184.86	794.29
9	David Rice	5,122.69	784.77
10	Ken Rice	3,421.78	524.20
11	Albert Salas	2,128.42	326.06

Detailed Results from the WinSoar scoring program:

2012-06-24-darts-unlimited-contest-results-final.pdf
2012-06-24-darts-unlimited-contest-round-scrores.pdf

Pictures from the event:

Thanks to Skye Malcom for taking the group pictures and the pictures of the winners

Clicking on a thumbnail brings up a full-size image (without the caption) suitable for downloading and printing.

The winners of the 2012 DARTS Unlimited Contest: Paul Weise - 3rd, Ron Mong - 2nd, Jerry Shape - 1st event: Darts Unlimited Contest picture: 2012-06-24-001.jpg location: Fairborn, OH date: 06-24-2012 revise info

The group shot: Don Harris, Ken Rice, Dave Rice, Paul Weise, Albert Salas, Jerry Shape, Bill Hoelcher, Chip Willis, Ron Mong and Norm Poti event: Darts Unlimited Contest picture: 2012-06-24-002.jpg location: Fairborn, OH date: 06-24-2012 revise info

 
Pre Contest Info:


In consideration for our out of town pilots, no round will begin after 4:00 PM to give them time to travel home

This event allows all sizes of models.  By definition AMA Class D - Unlimited allows the models from the smaller AMA classes to compete.  Basically, all sizes of models are OK.  Bring what you got and come fly with us!

For additional details of the rules, click on the link at the left

If anyone needs help in launching from a winch, we will be happy to help

This is a sanctioned AMA contest



 

Here are the graphics for the award plaques and the finished plaques:
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