If you're keeping score, there's been (2) opportunities to earn 2016 USA F-5B Team Selection Points with (3) remaining : this coming weekend in San Diego, 28-30 August in Maui and September 20th also in San Diego. Right now, there are just enough sessions left so a pilot whom hasn't yet been able to fly can upset the apple cart and make the Team!
Last Month's Scoring opportunity was held in mile high Denver thanks to our hosts Lenny and Barbara Keer. We thought we'd start breaking things...I mean "practice flying" on Saturday to get used to the altitude. The idea of flying off a sod farm with no altitude restrictions Sunday was appealing, but the heat had other ideas causing additional aircraft equipment breakdowns and exposed some flaws in our new Telemetry equipment that in retrospect, we are lucky to have unearthed : Hawaii would have been at least as hot and otherwise a disaster! Anytime in the future I hear "sod farm" I'm going to picture a slow moving but massive sprinkler system over-running BASE B with the BASE B crew abandoning their posts and cooling off like 6 year old kids! The rest of the crew had to get in one last flight to even things up before tearing down the tents and chairs as the mighty flooder slowly crept toward us! Had a nice in-between dinner of Colorado BBQ well planned by Ms. Keer on Saturday night ; good times, we missed those that couldn't make it. We were able to duplicate the heat problem with the telemetry ground station isolating it it to the low voltage output of the pulses coming out of the Futaba receiver. We fixed it in hardware and it worked perfect last weekend. This weekend everything should be perfect...yeah, right!
Anyhow, making scoring lemonade out of lemons, I elected to score the best flight out of Round 2 (each contestant at least launched (2) models) and the last round, each contestant having but one model left by then. All completed heats of Round 2 tallied the Watt-Minutes so those were figured in the scoring but not everyone in the last round had legitimate WM so I skipped it on that one to keep things even. We once again used the abbreviated precision duration (recall the approaching sprinkler monster) to good effect.
Lenny Keer was the winner of the day earning 1992.71 points, Jeff Keesaman not far behind with 1989.62 and Steve Neu enjoyed lots of Watt-Minutes earned 1951.17 points for his trouble. There you have it : everyone that wants a place in the "BIG SHOW" (Lugo Italy) next year needs to make ready and present themselves this Sunday for fun in the sun and Team Selection Points! We'll see you all there!
Steve Manganelli,
Chairman of the FAI-F5B/F5D Team Selection Committee
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