"noshi noshi" and competition flying in Australia vs. Europe

As I mentioned before I’ve flown my first Australian gliding comp not so long ago. There are quite a few differences to the European flying and one has to be aware of them not to have the day cancelled because of some rule breaks.

on the road again

Discus a

Starting from the beginning there is no Grid Time as such (in terms of a deadline to grid). You have to grid within a timeframe (usually around 1 hour or so) and you cannot do it earlier even if the row marks have already been set. You have your allocated row number that stays the same during the whole comp. The rows rotate and it’s not obvious that for example row 5 will be behind row 4 and so on. The rotation continues even if the previous day hasn’t been a flying day or has for any reason been cancelled.

marshaling

on the Grid

Another thing I wasn’t aware of before is the use of alternate start points. Every pilot has 3 different start points he can use every day. You get the list of yours at the beginning of the comp and have to make sure you don’t mix them up and use the wrong ones for the day. People over here got well used to it but for me it’s been another very important thing to consider before starting my task. You don’t have to declare the start points and can decide in the air which one to use. They are usually just a few kms apart. It’s pretty handy if the conditions are unstable (OD on one of them or a start point in a huge blue hole) but you have to use a nav software supporting this feature … and not all of them do. I’ve been flying with WinPilot for years, got well used to it and can basically do anything with it with my eyes closed. WinPilot doesn’t give you the option of putting 3 different (alternate) start points in your task (you can go max for 2 different start points). So I had to program 3 separate tasks with the different start points. The disadvantage is: you just don’t see them all on the screen at the same time. I don’t have the newest version of WP so maybe this option is already available … but if not, and Jerry P. is reading this by chance, he could consider including this in the next one. I used a second iPaq as my back up and ran XC Soar on that one. This gave me the option of alternate start points and was very helpful. It doesn’t make much sense though to use two different programs at once. Too much of a trouble. Looking at the results from previous Australian comps I was always wondering why people have different distances scored in a completed racing task. Now I know, they were just starting from different points. This is supposed to prevent gaggles and followers. You don’t have to tell anyone what your start points for the day are.

tie down spot

Because of the very wide range of gliders and therefore indexes the only task form was an AAT. I personally prefer racing tasks. That way everybody is in the same s…. ;-) and you can always set a task manageable even for the worst performance glider. Since too much of anything is usually not good a mix of both task types (like we have in Europe) seems to be a good solution.

One more thing that got me a bit confused is the handicap. It is applied on the achieved speed in the daily score tables. You cannot see the actual average speed somebody has flown but the handicapped one. In my opinion it is a bit clearer to apply the handicap on the points for the day. In the end it doesn’t change anything except giving everybody a better picture of the actual average speeds achieved.

on the run

All the gliders (even in the clubclass) were weight and got additional handicap for being under or over the reference weight. As far as I can remember it’s been 0.5% for every 12 kg weight difference. I was, I guess, 27 kg under my reference weight and therefore got additionally 1% . 0.5% of that gain was taken back for having winglets but I still kept the remaining 0.5%. It’s handy because you don’t have to try to load up your glider will all kinds of weird stuff just to be closer to the limit. Since water is not permitted in the club class I was happy to get the handicap – there was no way for me to put this additional 27 kg in any form. Maybe I should have thought about it earlier and have more beer to put some additional kilos on my ribs. Who knows … ;-)

under the wind sock

Oh, almost forgot about another two issues. Radio chat for tactical reasons is not allowed. Even our fun "noshi noshi, dushi dushi, sushi sushi" chat caused a huge discussion on the pilots mailing list. Somebody really seem to think it's a sort of code to communicate for tactical reasons. BTW, it would be quite an achievement to develop a code that works and includes just these 3 funny "polglish" words. In the competition spirit some just forget that it's all also (if not mainly) about fun :-)


The last difference I can think of at the moment is FLARM. It's mandatory but this is a subject for a separate post.