and so it begins

So after a lazy fly around on the practice day we move onto the first comp day. I was asked to help on doing the tasks for the Sport Class, when I asked Gerolf (who is on the task committee along with Davis and Attila) and Lukas about their thoughts on task setting for this class he laughed pretty hard when I said it would be good to get lots of people in the class at goal and make it 'fun', Lukas said task length did not matter if it was tail wind, yawned and walked off. No real help there, had to wait and see what the 'Task committee' suggested... the first task was set at 74km for Sport Class and 30 or so for "club Class" no I assumed Sport class was all king posted gliders with club being the new aero towers or single surface glider so I thought the Sport Class was probably a bit short especially for the HP gliders while and they agreed to change it to 89km, achievable by all. Turns out all intermediate gliders are the Club class and Sport Class is: One Discus, One U2 and One Litespeed HUH!

Anyway when we finally made it out to the airfield we all of course are launching last in these classes so no real hurry to do anything. Then someone yells "CHUTE" and sure enough there is one of the Russians in an Aeros Combat L coming down under chute about 800m west of the tow operations. Well I jump in the closest car with Vicki, Marty and Laura and motor on over there. Before we arrive we can see the pilot up and walking around, it was Sergei, and he explained as best he could that he had simply been thermalling and tumbled, it did appear that he came down nice slow and stable under his aero chute.




Then after we had 'broke down' the Combat and were heading back to the operations area I see a glider come out of the cart badly banked left, up it goes turns and plows in nose down. NOT GOOD! when we get closer Vicki needs to get out as she does not want to see the damage, fair enough, I drive over we already have a good crew helping 'Missy' Elliot who is having difficulty breathing and cannot feel anything below his neck. They have him on his side as best they can in his harness, he wants to be on his back but a brief discussion ensues and it was decided he was better not being moved. When the ambulance arrived there were grave concerns with his breathing so he was logged rolled over to his back and at one stage hi breathing was that labored and infrequent that someone said 'he's gone' I thought he was too, then he took a huge gasp and we all did the same. His breathing continued like that until they started bagging him. Not good to watch...

They finally got him off the field and I set to packing up his glider which had very little damage considering. Latest report is that he will recover. No spinal cord damage besides some damaged discs, he is in an induced coma at the moment. Damn good prognosis considering I thought he might not make it at all.

By this stage it was about 3.30 before the field opened again. Only the sport and club classes remained, plus a few gliders that had suffered significant damage from a dusty that blew through, me, I had a headache pretty bad by now and choose not to fly I told all the remaining guys to just shorten the task to the first turn point it was so late... then took a little lie down........