Practise Days Two and Three

On the second day of practice we flew out at the Worlds site on what I assume is the B line (northern end) for most of the day. For most of the day it was simply us and Shane Robinson from Ireland on that site. Shane was flying an Axiome which to my eye seems to be flying quite well. I have had a chance to see a few of these planes fly by different people and they are nice flying airplanes.




Gunther Ulsamer arrived and is again flying his own design the Opium. For some reason he has an affection to name his planes after drugs? The curious thing about this plane is that he does all the construction, and its fully composite and painted in the mold (or appears to be). He said it took about 6 months to complete the first model.





He is flying a new Hacker outrunner prototype motor in this model, I don't know much about it because he doesn't speak english and Dez doesn't speak much German! It looks like a Plettenberg from the back though!





His model had some interesting fences on the wing, apparently to reduce the bumpiness in turbulent conditions. Its very bumpy here, to my eye I am not sure it made much difference, as his plane seemed to be bumped around as much as anyone else.




After practice that day we went to see a bullfight, this was very interesting. Its hard to explain but basically a guy on a horse places a certain number of darts in the bulls back, there is much flair and obviously he is scored based on a bit of showmanship as well as skill in placing the dart. Then at the end a row of guys challenge the bull to charge them, and the first guy jumps on the bull trying to get between the horns. Most of the time they were not successful, as you can see in the picture!


For the third day of practice we flew at the south end of the main site. The Hong Kong team were there flying, and later Gunther and Bernd Bershorner arrived, as well as a few others to simply check out the site but not to fly.




Bernd was flying with the Vector Steering on his Plettenberg, this allows him to deflect the motor up to 7 degrees (or more) to aid in knife edge flight.




Here you can see a shot of the servo that drives the unit to rotate.
Bernd was flying an Addition which by comparison to some of the fat airplanes is a fairly small fuselage. He appeared to have every bit as much knife edge performance as some of the wide fuses. This may help him by having a smaller plane that deals with crosswind better, yet still have sufficient knife edge ability. We will see more in the upcoming days!




Thomas Kwan of the Hong Kong team was flying a Neptuno. I forget his name, but its of his own design I believe and is very similar to the Mid-Rex flown by Suzuki of Japan. This plane flew quite good as well. It has very nice construction, and well built.





Team Hong Kong, Thomas Kwan, Alex Lau, and our good buddy from California Adrian Wong holding Thomas's plane!