HGFA Skysailor Magazine

SKY SAILOR 7 November | December 2018 designed the Swift when he was a postgraduate student at Stanford. We had a nice engineer to engineer talk. After all these years, it was his first competition on his own creation. It all went well on the training day, my brand spanking new Litespeed RX Pro performed exactly the way I expected. I say ‘expected’, because I must say I’m more than a little spoiled with the quality of equipment I receive from Moyes. I’ve lost count of how many brand new gliders I’ve had for competitions over many years, but I don’t ever remember having any problems with any of them in recent times. Mysterious turns are a thing of the past, and this is a testament to the Moyes production team. Since I’ve had a fair bit of experience in hang glider manufacturing, I know that this is very hard to achieve. Glider tuning is something I can do, but it is not exactly a thing I want to spend my time doing before a competition, so having good gear out of the box is very pleasant (and necessary). In Big Spring we had only one training day, so things had to work straight away. Apart from the jet lag and a slowly developing cold, I was ready for the first day, but this was cancelled by the safety committee because the wind was too strong. After seeing a mini dust storm sweep past the staging area, nobody was complaining. Instead, off I went to Walmart to buy stuff I didn’t really need, except for a tripod for my new GoPro6. Afterwards, I stuffed my face with some bean burritos and went back to the Plaza. The next morning things looked better, so we set a task for each class. Although I was part of the tasksetting committee, the task was usually set by Zac and Larry and I mostly nodded. They had good ideas anyway, and besides, I had a feeling they didn’t really want me to set something crazy. Reputations, reputations… So the Open class ended up going north to Plainview in a slight dogleg shape, same for the Swifts, and slightly shorter for the Sport class. Again, the day turned out to be windy, nearly borderline for a safe day, but off we went. We had clouds at first, and okay conditions. We could see a lot of dust in the air and big dust devils. In Texas this is a good sign, because the dust is relatively heavy, so a dusty means good lift. I had my fair share of them this year. After a relatively easy run to Lamesa, things started to change into cloudless conditions. At Lamesa, after gliding past an enormous area covered with solar panels, I got quite low, about 400m from the deck, so decided to take it a bit more easy. The drift was very strong, I therefore knew the second leg would be far from easy. After touching the turnpoint (TP) circle, it became obvious that today’s task was going to be on the difficult side. After getting low a few times by trying to fight a strong crosswind, I spotted a glider circling up from low. This wasn’t too far from goal, but not quite on glide yet, so I was patient. I didn’t realise at the time that it was Zac, but we headed off to find our last thermal together. He stopped in something and I pushed on. He was right and I was wrong, since a little later he was on final while I was low saving. Demoralising. These are the moments when I realise, clearly, I should fly more competitions to not end up in heroic (i.e. stupid) low saves! Anyway, I started looking for where goal might be. My numbers were okay, but where was the Big Spring, Texas, is known for its dust devils Robin Hamilton gets help on launch as a dusty forms, a normal occurrence on launch in Big Spring A safe place for the gliders and a beautiful site to see when walking into the hangar Big Spring Airport provides for us Gliders rest in goal after a great flight across the Texan sky