On Tue, 09 Mar 2021 14:35:48 -0800, andy l wrote:

Even at the summit of supposed self-centeredness, international
competitions, there are far more people there than just the team pilots,
and they don't all leave shortly after the flying is done for the day.
It is also a social event. There and all round the world, some of these
folk have been friends for years, some just starting.

Agreed. Some of the best fun I've had while not actually flying, was
after I'd soloed and converted to the SZD Juniors. There were maybe half
a dozen of us and, as is common at my club, we all being winch launched,
not having yet converted to aero tow. So, it was common the have a gaggle
of Junior pilots in an unofficial queue for the Juniors and so one of our
amusements, if the day was good enough for the Juniors to stay up, was to
see if we could organise the flight line well enough to beat 20 launches
an hour off our two drum winch.

We never managed that: 18/hour wasn't too hard to maintain for an hour or
so, with one of us staying in the cable retrieve truck and another four
helping at the launch point, keeping the launch queue pushed up and
retrieving landing gliders - that is, if none of the instructors waited
until they and their student was at the head of the queue and in the
glider before briefing them - but we never did crack 20/hour. Fun to try,
though.

We had similar fun running rope during competitions, by seeing how fast
we could launch the grid and trying to avoid having a queue of waiting
tugs.

Sadly, now we have a booking system on weekends for pre-solo pilots,
there just aren't enough people at the launch point to play those games.


--
Martin | martin at
Gregorie | gregorie dot org