Is the Francisco Grande Golf Resort a good place to hold a hang gliding meet? I think so, but it takes a whole bunch of pilots thinking so to make for a well attended competition.

First off it is a great idea to hold a hang gliding meet at a small resort so that everyone can be together and socialize with everyone else before and after the tasks. Everyone stays at the hotel (with a reduced room rate), and eats and drinks at the restaurant and bar. This makes for a lively community.

Last year we had free broad band access at the hotel. This year they charged $10/day. Bad move on their part. Next year they say they will provide free high speed internet access. We need fast access for scoring and for weather forecasting, as well as for pilot access. I had my trailer down the road with slower (3G) internet access, which slowed down and impaired my weather forecasting.

The grass in the desert makes for a great place to setup the gliders and tugs. Shade from the trees, the hot tub and the pool all make for better pilot attitudes.

The launch area is just to the west of the resort. This brings about a few problems with pilot attitudes. If you land at the resort (which we try to do), you have a bit of a walk through the golf course to get to the launch area. This can be a hassle. There is a big field closer to the setup area at the hotel, and it would be better to launch there, but it is downwind of the trees on the golf course and smaller than the field to the west.

The launch field is dusty, due to the fact that we break the hard surface by driving our cars on the field, or landing our tugs on the "runway." The meet organizers put down lots of water on the runway and after getting this working well, they kept the dust down to a reasonable level. But before that the dust was discouraging especially when the wind was blowing it.

The dust got into everything and we were cleaning, spraying, and waxing our harness zippers. I kept cleaning the Wills Wing T2C. It will take a while to get my truck back into shape, along with the interior of my trailer.

Dustin says that the hotel is willing to come up with some methods of significantly reducing the dust in the launch area. This both needs to be done and pilots who might want to come next year need to be reassured that in fact the dust is no longer a big issue. I'd like to see a combination of methods. I'll be reporting on this in the future and will reassure pilots if in fact the hotel has solved this problem.

The flying in this area is not particularly strong and consistent, and the task committee (including me) fell down on the job by calling tasks that were a little too long. But the flying was pleasant and certainly consistent and strong enough to be a fair test of pilot skills. It was roughly on a par with flying in Florida (without the cu's, but dust devils instead), with higher altitudes and often stronger lift. It was not as consistent, as high, or as strong as Big Spring.

You can land almost any where and there was only one time that I had to abort from a low save because I couldn't have a safe landing.

There was a bit too much wind, and this was apparently abnormal for this time of year. We want less wind so that we can come back to the resort and celebrate our flying.

I look forward to going back to the Francisco Grande next year. I can see a number of improvements that we can make to make it more enjoyable for pilots. We need to have a location to put up paper copies of the scores, for example. (The latest versions were always on line, but with the high fees for internet access this was not so available to pilots.) Better internet access would also make for better weather forecasting. Downloading in the bar was a good idea (for the pilots and the bar), but we need a better table setup there.