Monday, November 5, 2007

First Day of Practice

Well today we hit the Parana practice site around noon to start getting ready for the big week next week.



First we started off with a well needed breakfast to get us through the rest of the day. The breakfast at the Holiday Inn is pretty good.



After we ate we packed up the cars and took off toward Parana, on the way just happens to be a Wal-Mart, so we had to stop and pick up some essentials like water, chairs, snacks etc.





The Wal-Mart patrons in Argentina are not a lot different than the patrons at the local Wal-Marts in North America, just look at the picture and see if you agree?




The drive to the Parana practice site is fairly scenic with construction, a tunnel, police (or military we are not really sure) checkpoints that check to see if your lights are on! A few general shots of the country side during the drive...


We did fairly easily find the practice site and joined the team from Chile, and a couple of members from the German team who were finishing up and left shortly after we got there. We managed to get in a few flights and later in the day Adrian Wong from California along with the Hong Kong team and the team from Thailand arrived and began getting their gear setup and ready.

I managed to squeeze in 4 flights and start getting accustomed to the conditions. It was fairly windy today probably up around 15-20 mph at the top of the box. With the wind at our backs at this site and a bunch of tree's behind us landing was a bit interesting due to the turbulence. Everyone was having trouble with the tricking landing situation.




Rene of team Chile and his pair of Genesis (Genesi?)





Some members of the local club were out to setup a shade shelter for us. Someone was missing the directions as it ended up taking about 10 people to finally figure out how to assemble it, easily the most entertaining part of the day!




Here are the guys from Thailand trying to get a YS 170 going. They were having a lot of trouble with this engine. We left before they were able to get it running but hopefully they got it solved.




Adrian Wong and his team mate from Hong Kong watch the flying. Adrian was just checking out the practice sites as he did not have his planes assembled yet. His primary suffered some damage to the canopy which is unfortunate as it is an Akiba built Proline.




This is an Extreme Composite Proline which one of the Hong Kong team members was flying. It seemed to fly very well and had a ton of power with the YS 170.




We will be back out practicing tomorrow at one of the sites. Not 100% sure which one yet.

Chad

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you Chad for posting pictures and stories. It is very much appreciated since I stayed at home with my own flying companions!

Good luck and have a nice stay!

bob forest said...

Xavier, good luck to you and the team. The blog is very interesting, and enjoy the pics. Focus, Focus and don't think wind. and you will all be alright. Take the wind to your advandtage. I have a feeling you will have it all through your competition. Weather here cold and rain and some sun.

bob forest said...

I forgot to mention that the caller is very important, Xavier, be sure to keep Dez relaxed, keep your cool, which I know you will. Same for Chad's caller. Thank You Chad for having this Blog.