3D Downunder 2003 - Page 2
Simon Lockington

Sunday morning pilot briefing

Judges (on the bench), Jamie Wilson, Gary Watson and Marc Swan

Gary Watson's Tempest 3D

Jamie Wilson's CS in full flight

Mike Farnan

Unhappy Rappy, tipped over at the bottom of an auto.

The decision was made to change the flight line to take into account the cross wind which could have become a safety issue.

The first fliers up were the Beginners, of which there was only one, Anton who has to be congratulated for having the nuts to get up there and give it a go in front of a lot of people!

The intermediate guys put on a good show and I was especially impressed by Andrew Donaldson's rolling circle with what I think was an Ergo 50. There was plenty of talent in this class and I'm sure we'll see it develop further before the next event.

The open class was next and there was plenty of good flying to be had here with a good mix of big open technical flying and low impressive stuff all done to music which added another dimension to the flight.

I was second in the flight order and nervously carried the Vigor out to the flight line. I had choreographed the whole flight and Darryll was going to stand next to me with a sheet of paper and a stop watch and call the manoeuvres for me. This all worked fine in theory but we'd never had a chance to actually fly to the music before leaving New Zealand. I had broken the music up into four different segments which had different music mixed in together for the different styles of flight that happened in that segment. The problems began when I arrived to start a manoeuvre far too early and ended up waiting for the music to start the second segment, then I had race through and even drop a manoeuvre to get to the start of the third segment. By now I was pretty gutted, and so had to ad-lib a few of the joining manoeuvres. The low inverted hover was at the end of the third segment and seeing as I'd made such a hash of the flight so far I thought about trying to replicate the blade scuff I'd accidentally done for the photographer on Friday. I got very low but chickened out at the last minute as I didn't want to wrap the CS up and look like an idiot in front of all these people!
I finished the flight with some piro flips and an inverted auto. I was a little gutted about my performance, I should probably have not tried to do the whole choreographed thing without prior practise and just flown with the music in the background. You live and learn!

As expected, Jamie Wilson put on a great flight pulling some nice smooth manoeuvres ending with a chaos auto. Very nice.

What was great was as each person was flying everyone else was lined up behind the judges cheering them on and clapping, this, with the music, added a bit of a 'party' atmosphere to the whole event which made it thoroughly enjoyable.

With the first round over it was time for lunch and the organisers went away to decide if the weather was going to allow a further round. While this was going on the Auto contest got underway. I thought I'd be smart and do a very slow auto down to allow me time to line the heli up with the target, however, by the time it got near the target I had little rotorspeed left to maneuver and landed outside the circle which was a little embarrassing. For the next auto I dived it in and got one of the skids on the target which was a bit better. Shortly helis were lined up idling away waiting for their turn.
Further down the field a radar system was being erected so people could measure their helis doing speed runs down the flight line.

The guys from Rotormotion came past my pit area with their new Bergen Intrepid Gasser and asked if I would fly it in the speed runs to see what it would do. I was dead keen on this idea as I'd heard a lot about the Bergen Gassers and was very keen to give it a go.
Having done quite a bit of flying with my old JR Z230 Gasser it was interesting to see how this one would compare. Firstly I had to say it was MUCH smoother than most gassers I've seen and certainly seemed to be very lively and it certainly stormed around the flight line punching through wind gusts with the same brutish authority that only gassers have.
As I waited for our turn for the speed run I saw the flying bandsaw go up again, this is the little Sceadu with the mega headspeed I spoke of earlier. It steamed up into the sky and started diving for the run. It rapidly picked up a lot of speed then all of a sudden pitched badly, the pilot sorted it out and carried on only to have it pitch again! He was certainly in for a wild ride alright!
Next it was time for the big gasser to have a go and away we went. It wasn't terribly happy at full stick, apparently due to an incorrectly set high speed needle, so I climbed up high and did a long dive towards the radar station, the first attempt was fairly average, however on the second I climbed a bit higher and tried to line up on the radar a bit better and it came in at 134km/h which at that time was the highest speed recorded that day (it was later beaten by a CS I think). The gasser was very enjoyable to fly, very nimble.

One of the major attractions for the Sunday was the arrival of two very large scratch built turbine helicopters, one in a Long Ranger fuse, the other, pod and boom mechanics. These were serious machines alright, I believe they were about 16-18kg a piece dry. I know this cause picking them up was a bit of effort! Each machine was equipped with 950mm SAB blades.
Every part was scratch built on these machines, the frames, the head, the gearbox, the fuse, everything.
Another striking machine was a very special JR Z230 gasser, however this was nothing like JR ever made! The guy who owned it had built a contra-rotating head for it just like one of those Russian Kamov things! This thing was a very SERIOUS piece of work! I took a few pictures of it and I'll let them tell the story…
When the weather had cleared a little, the big Long Ranger was fired up, out in the middle of the flight line it sat silent when all of a sudden a low hissing sound grew louder into a deep roar followed by the whining noise reserved only for turbines spooling up. Shortly the blades started slapping the turbine exhaust and the big heli lifted off. It was amazing, you had to hear the thing to experience it. It was so big it looked like it had to be flown like a full size machine long shallow descents followed by a flare into the hover, it was great! All the while that turbine kept howling and the blades emitted that awesome slapping noise every now and then.

The flightline re-opened to general flying, however with the rain coming in some of the out-of-towners started to make their way home while the rest of us headed back to the motel to relax and in my case, disassemble the helicopters back into the Curtis case.

3D Downunder was a great event, it was a shame about the weather and all, I think next time people will probably adhere a bit more to the schedule as things did slip a little, but in the end everyone had a tonne of fun which is all that matters. We saw some great machinery, some great flying done by great pilots who were among the large group awesome people we met while over there. At this stage I haven't heard of when they intend on repeating this event, but if/when they do, it's one not to miss!

Neil Additcott's Vigor, it had a lockout and decided to fly out to the main road and spread itself from one side of the road to the other. This was the machine that Neil was going to fly at the Vic Champs the following weekend.	The pod and boom turbine.
The internals of the turbine heli.	The pod and boom turbine in flight
Turbine LongRanger in flight.	Bergen Intrepid Gasser which I flew in the speed runs. Managed to get it up to 134km/h.
The contra-rotating Z230	Close up shot of the Z230's rotorhead.
Another shot of the Z230	Jared Hartley, one of the organisers from the Bendigo club.