2005 F3C World Championships
Simon Lockington

Within 20-30 mins of driving with the Aussies (and their GPS) we were lost.

Still lost

Rick, Gary and Mick with one of the secret ingredients of 'enhanced coke'.

Lost again, but much closer this time and we found some stray Indonesians

This is the incredible Swiss electric, an amazing machine.

New Zealand flag flying proudly

Aaron (right) practising with his Caliber.

Every two years the FAI holds the F3C World Championships, this time it was being held in Spain in the rural town of Zamora, hosted by the local organization Club Aeromodelismo.

I had been planning on going to the previous Worlds in 2003, held in Noto, Japan. However I didn’t end up getting my act together in time, so I decided to wait for the 2005 competition in Spain.

Given that I didn’t really want to be the only New Zealander there, I managed to convince another guy from New Zealand, John Knox, that he should come as well. The only problem was John is currently on work placement in Papua New Guinea and wouldn’t be able to prepare any machines, so I was going to have to do it for him. The plan being, I’d build and setup his new machines, he’d come over a few days before we were due to leave for Spain and have a few practice flights to try and get relatively familiar with his totally new setup, and then leave to compete in the Worlds! Pretty sound plan don’t you think????

Aaron Williams, who has competed in the two previous World Champs was also keen to come along, so for the first time in ages, New Zealand had a complete F3C Team.

DAY ONE - GETTING TO ZAMORA
I was stressing over my baggage weights. After looking up the Qantas website and realizing that each additional kilo over your allowance was going to be AU$40 (US$30). The standard allowance is 20kg but because I have a Qantas Club membership my allowance was 30kg. The unfortunate thing was, my loaded Curtis case was 29kg! Along with that I had to add my bag of clothes, camera bag and other assorted crap.

I had been planning on taking my non-helicopter stuff as carry on which was in a fairly grey area as far as carry on luggage allowances were concerned (in reality, if you were going by the exact letter of the rules, it was pretty clear I wasn’t going to be able to do that). However the plan was to be wandering around the terminal carrying the bags like they weighed nothing at all (in reality, they were pretty damn hefty). The ruse worked on the check-in girl and I was silently congratulating myself on my stunning mastermind plan, when I was stopped by a random security officer in immigration who was armed with a pair of scales! He proceeded to then weigh my bags and scalded me for having too much carry on. I played the naive tourist and he sent me back to the service desk to get one of my bags checked on. By now I was sure I was going to be shafted with the AU$40 per kilo charges, but the service desk guy happily checked my bag in and sent me on my way! Suckers! I had gotten away scott free. Off to the lounge to wait for my flight.

Soon enough Dave, the Australian team manager and Andrew, one of the Australian pilots turned up, they were on the flight leaving an hour after mine.

My flight went to Madrid via Singapore and Heathrow and was pretty uneventful, apart from watching some Qantas hostesses trying to convince a guy who had drunk a little too much that he was in no condition to fly. That was pretty funny. He swore black and blue that he was just fine, right up until he leaned against a cardboard cutout of a hostess which sent it, and him, tumbling past the metal detectors and resulting in him flapping around on the ground like a freshly caught salmon.

I met Aaron Williams, one of my teammates at Heathrow and boarded the flight for Madrid, hoping that the helicopters had successfully checked all the way through!

We landed in Madrid and got through immigration easily then set about trying to find where our checked luggage might appear. Given the high possibility that the helicopters might qualify as oversize luggage and come out in some other area. While Aaron kept an eye out on the conveyor belt I went looking to see if there were any oversize collection areas. There weren’t any I could immediately find, so I asked and eventually communicated what I was looking for to the airline person who said all items should come down the conveyor. Excellent.

Things weren’t looking good for Aaron and I when it seemed that just about everyone else had got their bags and our helicopter cases had not made an appearance. The stress was starting to build when I finally saw our cases come down the conveyor, mine upside down.

We had organized to meet John and his wife Shelley who were flying in from another route that had gone via Frankfurt, and also the Australian’s at Madrid where we would get our rental cars and all drive to Zamora together. We met the first group of Australians who included the remaining two pilots, Gary Watson and Mick Warren as well as George Atkinson, Rick Malaith and Glenn Asquith. John and Shelley from our team had also arrived about an hour prior. Andrew and Dave, the second group of Aussies, were due about an hour or so after us.

I arrived to find Mick and Gary drinking, which didn’t surprise me too much, they were creating ‘Enhanced Coke’ with product from a Coke machine they’d found, and plenty of the duty free products they’d purchased. I was only too happy to help them test Enhanced Coke. Numerous times.

While I was testing Enhanced Coke with Gary and Mick, John was trying to sort out our pre-booked rental cars and found that the agency had decided to give us two hatchbacks instead of the station wagons we had previously ordered and that the cars weren’t even at the airport. They were in downtown Madrid… To their credit they had the cars sent up to the airport for us, so we set about waiting to see what we had.

Meanwhile, Dave and Andrew had turned up and Dave set about organizing all the Australian cars.

John was getting restless so decided we should leave or Zamora ourselves and the Aussies could catch up later. I, knowing that finding our way out of Zamora probably wouldn’t be as easy as we thought, wasn’t too enthusiastic about the idea, but off we went anyway to find our cars. The cars we’d been allocated/cursed with, were small Citroen hatchbacks, that could just fit the helicopter cases with about three centimeters to spare.

John and Shelley were in one car with Aaron and myself in the other. I had no desire to drive in Spain, so Aaron took up the driving duties and away we went, heading to Zamora.

With in two minutes we were lost. Two minutes after that, we became separated from John and Shelley. So now we decided to try and head back to the airport, find the Australians, and travel to Zamora with them. After all, they had a GPS unit that would surely mean we wouldn’t get lost.

The problem with that plan is that the road signs have no English and even though we were about five minutes drive away from the airport, we didn’t know how to get back.

Eventually, the five minute drive took us 30 minutes to get back by the time we’d gone round and round the airport ring road. We parked up and I went to see how the Aussies were getting on. Dave was still sorting out the cars, Gary and Mick were still drinking, the others were milling around.

When they had sorted themselves out we set out in a four car convoy towards Zamora. With George and Glenn in the lead car with the GPS navigating, I was highly confident. 30 minutes later I was less confident when we all got lost in downtown Madrid. We pulled over at a petrol station while George and Glenn held a meeting to sort out where we were and how to get to Zamora.

After a good tour of downtown Madrid we hit a highway that looked promising, after a couple more stops on the side of the road to confirm our whereabouts we were on our way to Zamora.

THE FLYING SITE
After a few hours of driving on the very good roads through the picturesque Spainish countryside we were getting near Zamora. We were keen on taking a look at the flying field as it was on the way into town. After taking what were thought were the correct side roads, we got lost. However we found the Indonesian team who were also lost so another roadside conference was held to determine our position.

Soon enough the official flying field was located on top of a hill range above where a new highway was being built.

My initial impressions were how dry everything was, lots of dust and tumble weeds about. The field had a couple of tarsealed runways where one flightline could be run, but I couldn’t see where the second one was going to be staged.

The rest of the facilities weren’t too bad though, a lot of shade was available and there seemed to be good catering present. There were shade tents provided for each team in a compound like area.

We got our fuel that the organizers had sorted out for us and stood around and watched a couple of guys fly before we decided to head off and find our hotel. I was kind of excited about getting to the hotel. I had visions of the same kind of hotel we stayed at when we were in Bali which was just great. Visions of a pool with a bar, and air-conditioning and great food… I was looking forward to a great shower and a bit of a rest to recover from the trip before assembling the helicopters.

HOTEL REY DON SANCHO
After navigating through downtown Zamora, Aaron and I found our way to our hotel and attempted checking in. One of the problems was that there were next to no English speaking people in our hotel so communicating became a real chore, one we were going to get used to over the next two weeks. I later found out that was a common theme in all the hotels.

I get checked in and start hauling my stuff up to my room. As soon as I opened the door I knew the term ‘room’ was an overstatement. Perhaps ‘closet’ or ‘small storage area with bed’. There was no airconditioning involved which was going to be problem given it was 40 degrees celcius outside.

Another problem was space. The only area I could put my suitcase and Curtis case was blocking the ‘wardrobe’ (another term used generously in this case) area beside my bed which in turn meant that I had to turn sideways and inhale deeply to get to my bed. Nice.

Assembling the helis, took place on the bed due to lack of room, and then they were shoehorned into the space between the end of my bed and the wall. There was certainly no room for them to stretch out that’s for sure!

With the helis all nicely tucked away and on charge, I went off to find John and Shelley who should have already been checked in if they had made it out of Madrid alive, as we had not seen them since we got lost. They had managed to check in fine and we decided to go down to the bar and have a drink.

Once we negotiated some drinks with the bar tender who couldn’t understand a thing we said (communication was done by pointing and hand signals), we got into some of the very cheap alcohol available.

We noticed a few other obviously helicopter related people hanging out, but we couldn’t make out where they might be from.

By now, we were very hungry and keen to get something to eat before the severely powerful alcohol that John and Shelley were drinking knocked them flat on their ass.

Instead of venturing downtown to find something to eat we decided to try the hotel’s ‘restaurant’ then retire back to the bar for more of the potent alcohol that Shelley was by now starting to take a liking to.

It’s hard to describe the Rey Don Sancho’s restaurant. But if it were to be only in a few words, the words would be ‘cheesy, cheap, thrown-together arrangement trying to pretend (but not fooling anyone) that it was a high class establishment’.

The menu arrived and I selected the only thing that didn’t have seafood which was steak and chips, with an entrée of vegetable soup. After communicating that numerous times to the ‘waiter’ he left and we waited with baited breath on the outcome.

I started looking around the room to see what we might be in for and immediately saw that the other ‘diners’ didn’t look overly enthusiastic about their meals. These people may or may not have been able to speak English, but the look of distaste is universal…

Sure enough, the ‘soup’ arrived and it was freezing cold. Apparently this was by design, ok, that’s cool, I’ll give it a go. By the third spoonful I had enough of the slops and told the waiter to take it away. I hoped that the main course was going to be better… When my 4mm thick ‘steak’ arrived, it was sitting in 2mm of oil with chips (about 10 of them) that were more like strips of warm potato. By now I was getting pretty steamed up as it was becoming more and more apparent, that we weren’t staying in a great hotel. I secretly hoped the Australian’s weren’t doing any better.

Back to the bar to wash the aftertaste away. By now I’d worked out that the British, Hong Kong and Israeli teams were at our hotel.

Page Two - Unofficial Practise