2005 F3C World Championships
Simon Lockington

John Knox practising with his Sylphide

Kobayashi practising with his one.

Hiroki Itou

Micheal Leung from Hong Kong

DAY TWO - UNOFFICAL PRACTISE
The next morning we met at breakfast, breakfast being bread and coffee. Yes, my expectations of this hotel were falling rapidly.

We loaded up the Citroens and headed out to the field to get some flying in. Today was unofficial practice and I was keen to get the engines tuned for the heat and fuel.

As expected the flight line was very busy with everyone wanting to do exactly the same thing I wanted to do.

We found a spot to set our gear down and went to investigate what the story was for the day. We very quickly found out that there was no frequency control provided by the organizers, instead everyone was just writing their frequencies on a bit of paper that was attached to a post. The deal being you checked to see if anyone was on your frequency and if there was, you found them and began negotiations. Interesting. Certainly not what I was expecting at a World Championships!

There was room for about five or so people to fly at once on the main flight line which wasn’t too bad. There were also three other practice fields available. Seeing the congestion, the Australians went to investigate the other fields.

The practice fields had been organized so that all the people on 35mhz flew at one field, 40mhz at another field and 72mhz at a third field. We were wondering about the wisdom of putting everyone on the same band at the same field with the resulting frequency clashes.

The organizers had warned that penalties would be applied to any team that setup their own practice field outside those nominated, so we were all keen to abide by those rules.

Given that we were already established, I was keen to stay where we were, so the Aussies set off to see what they could find at the 72mhz field. Meanwhile, I cranked up one of the Sylphides to start on the engine tuning.

At home, I’d been running 15% nitro and here we were using 30% in an attempt to try and counter the loss of horsepower due to the heat. I did a few passes to assess the needles, richening up both the top end and mid range a couple of clicks until I got the machine to where I thought it would be ok. The net result was it was down on power from what it normally got at home, but it wasn’t too bad.

The sky was very busy with all sorts of exotic machinery streaking around. It was very still and pretty hot which made autorotations pretty difficult. Landing on the tarsealed surface (it was either that or the desert type sand) immediately made me wish I’d put skid stoppers on my skids!

Both John and Aaron had a couple of practice flights and got their machines running well. Aaron just missed a decent sized rock that was being used to mark out our square (we had to get creative) at the bottom of an auto, but apart from that, everything was cool.

Then the Australians turned up again and began to describe in great detail just how crap the 72mhz flying site was. None of them deemed it suitable to fly at (something about it being a dirt wasteland and full of helicopter-eating rocks). So they had come back to try their luck at the main field.

Andrew, Mick and Gary all flew and got their machines settled with Andrew being the only one to have a little bit of trouble. A clunk line failure in his main tank saw him having to perform a pretty hairy out field auto with which we were all holding our breath.

THE JAPANESE TEAM
Surprisingly, the Japanese team made an appearance and started flying with everyone. We had just assumed that they would have been at some kind of purpose built training facility burning 44 gallons of fuel each a day. Not surprisingly, pretty much everyone stopped to watch them do their first flights.

It was interesting to see the difference in headspeeds that they all used. One was at 1380, another at 1500 and the other up around 1600. I knew this because the guys standing beside me had the machines under intensive surveillance with their tachometers.

All three spent a lot of time just hovering, doing nothing really, not even the hovering maneuvers. Just hovering. Then they took off for their aerobatics. They went wayyyy out and up high, then they would come streaking in, Sylphides howling at warp factor five. In most cases they were starting their rolls at the height of the top of my loops! It should be noted though that during the competition they didn’t do that.

It sure didn’t sound like they were having any trouble with their OS engines leaning out either! Mind you, with Factory OS technicians on hand to help them, you would expect that…

With the novelty of the Japanese flying now gone, normal flying resumed and it was good to see the Japanese weren’t afraid of mixing it up with the rest of us. Their Sylphides shared the skies with the rest of our machines taking turns at doing aerobatics just like everybody else.

The awesome Swiss electric machine made an appearance and once again impressed the crap out of me.

I flew my second machine which I knew to have a vibration in it that I hadn’t been able to track down before I left home. The sad part about that was that although it had an annoying vibration, it actually flew better than the other one.

With the flying taken care of, we sat down to compare notes on hotels and food. I was convinced that the Australians MUST be in a much better hotel than we were. They on the other hand were absolutely sure that our hotel couldn’t have been worse than theirs. Then we turned to the quality of the hotel food, with me being once again sure that their hotel food couldn’t be worse than ours. Once again, the Australians were absolutely positive that their food was even worse. The net result being that we all agreed we needed to find somewhere else to eat.

The Australians met us at our hotel and they immediately declared victory in the “My hotel is worse than yours” competition which I found hard to believe. We loaded up in the Australian people movers and set off to find somewhere to eat.

We parked up and walked for ages up and down streets trying to look for somewhere appetizing. After half an hour of no success, the name’s ‘Burger King’ and ‘McDonalds’ were being tossed around as potentials which is pretty sad.

We ended up at this underground type burger bar where we were served up some real average chicken burgers where there was some doubt as to how cooked they were. We were not off to a great start on the culinary side of things…

The Australians dropped us off at our hotel, but before heading to bed we decided to pop into the bar to see who was there, you know, just to be neighbourly and all. There we found members of the British team, the Israeli’s and a team we’d get to know a lot better (in the bar) over the upcoming week or so, the Norwegians.

THE NORWEGIAN TEAM
We met the Norwegians at the bar and commenced discussing everyone’s favourite subject, helicopters. The Norwegians are real down to earth guys more than happy hang out and have two or six drinks with you.

We compared notes on food, the quality of their rooms, the quality of their practice site, the main competition site, the organization so far, and rental cars. We told them about our wimpy Citroens and they countered with a description of their rental three cylinder, turbo diesel Smart car that was only big enough for two people with maybe one piece of luggage each. However they cheerfully described that it could (with some convincing) pull 170km/h coming into Zamora and still get incredible fuel economy!

Page Three - Scrutineering