On Thursday, January 10, 2013 9:02:29 AM UTC+11, Fox Sierra wrote:
BB,



Your keen insights as a professor of risk and volatility are needed here! How is it possible that so many gliders land within a few kilometers of the finish with a standard deviation of achieved distances of only a few kilometers!?!?!? Assuming there was not a wall of rain blocking the landing zone, wouldn't a few gliders be expected to have the extra 100 meters of altitude required??

FS

From Australian team pilot Craig Collings:
" Today we gridded on the North end of the airfield with a strong northerly blowing. At the briefing the weatherman said he expected it to move around to the south; which it did, strong from the north to strong from the south! Wind is the theme.
The club class task was over set for the conditions at 248km, will all of the pilots landing out. Tobi and I started early again, 30 minutes after the start open, and had trouble staying together on the first leg (100km into a 30+km/h wind). We were flying alone and after a couple of hours I was the first to get picked up by the gaggle, Tobi was still about 17km ahead. Around 5pm the thermal weakened significantly and the gaggle (about 20 gliders) was taking every thermal from varying from 0.5 to 1.5 knots and rising to 3300ft; we still had about 70km to run of which 50km was into a head wind. Eventually we picked up Tobi and took the last flew climbs in the dying day. Landing at 7pm, I made the furtherest distance, 5.8km from the airfield. After handicaps were applied we came 10th and 11th for the day."