Results here.

The Lienz weather forecast here.

Corinna's reports here. Norwegian here. Richard Lovelace here.

Gerolf Heinrichs <<email>> writes:

The Swiss team decided to leave today. They were not in the right mood for more flying as it seems, or shall we say, for more hanging around here in Greifenburg waiting waiting waiting for the weather to improve.

I agree with you that PDF files are not a smart format for results, at least not if we wanted them to be promoted and made public on the internet. I guess the pilots should push organizers more in this respect. The scorers here are not to blame, they do really a great job – no complaints about them so far.

To my knowledge it is still all up to the organizers what scoring tools are being used even in CAT1 events (as long as the formula resembles some formerly tested GAP version) and CompeGPS is probably used this year again because the organizers are just familiar with it (while FS which certainly seems the future for us, is still too new to them).

As for Elio not winning the task despite having done the fastest run: Yes, apparently he scored some altitude penalty points, which we have introduced to counter-act the hazard of potential tactical cloud flying in the pre-start period. I was quite impressed that we could get this going here, after talking for ever about the trouble with pilots doing the “white out thing” for getting the perfect start over years.

The way it works is, that the scorers (manually so far!) check the altitude of the first track-log point for a pilots task log, and compare it to a given altitude limit that the task setters decide upon for the day. On task two this altitude limit was set to 2200 meters, with a progressive square power penalty formula that would cost you about 12.5 points for being 50 meters to high, but already 50 points for being 100 too high. Elio apparently fell in between there somewhere, as he lost around 20 points from his initial score.

There has been plenty of discussion on the potential reasons of Richi’s tumble. To stop some of them speculations let me say this: we can’t blame task setting, and it was not due to hazardous weather conditions. With the approaching warm front we found ourselves rather in a quickly building overcast and despite the fresh and crisp air mass, conditions where no where near what we had been experiencing here at times with a fresh Northerly. In fact the winds where only 15-20kmh from SW at the most throughout the task and there was no need to ever end up on a lee side face.

Upon measuring sprogs on gliders here during the comp Richi was reportedly found rather low on his sprog setup, was instructed about it and from what we hear apparently did slightly alter his setup to some degree after that. By how much, however, we don’t know for sure. Swiss team pilot Franz Hermann was able to take a closer look at the glider yesterday and reported it being found on full VG setting. Walter Maier from the Austrian team, who flew just seconds in front of Richi when it all happened told they experienced some rough air near a potential good thermal when he got weightless himself for a quick moment, then looked back and watched Richi’s glider snap in hard in front of him the very next moment. Walter himself fortunately was flying a little more proactive in this situation and was already on half VG or less, in anticipation of that strong thermal nearby.

Today we had a lengthy pilot’s discussion on glider pitch stability and proactive flying in rough air. Most pilots showed up at that meeting, Dennis Pagen presented some first statistics on the conducted sprog measurements, followed by a really unusually constructive discussion on various safety matters. One could see that comp pilots these days do definitely care more about what it takes to fly and tune high performance competition wings then this has ever been in the past.

Such discussion will of course not bring Richi Meier back to life. We all know that very well. However, it may help some others to avoid a similar fate in the near and far future.

I hope that the scorekeepers took into account the 100 meter or so inaccuracy in the GPS in vertical height (GPS measurements), also the differences that I've noticed between what my flight computer read while I was in the air and the heights displayed later in SeeYou from the IGC file. Also, it seems strange that they only check at the start circle. Easy to check the rest of the flight. Of course, the reported altitude drifts during the day as the pressure changes, as the pressure altitude it reported as a default (although you can view the GPS altitude also).