Official Opening Ceremony at Leszno's main square

Yesterday all teams gathered at main City square for official opening of WGC 2014 at 6 PM local time.

Several officials from Aeroclub of Poland, FAI, organizers and City of Leszno  attended ceremony and make official speeches

I posted few pictures (link on the left) from opening. Maria may have more available shortly.

Let the games begin...

At this moment (6:40AM local) we have blue sky, some high cirrus (1/10) and sun.

More when tasks are known.

Jarek

Worlds are Open

Jerzy

Opening Ceremony

We are now back from the opening ceremony in downtown Leszno.  All the teams were paraded into the town square with a marching band and a majorette leading each team and carrying a sign indicating the country.

The official's were recognized and a few speeches were made, but the whole affair lasted only an hour.  After that we were free to visit one of the many sidewalk cafes and beer tents.

After tasting a nice Tyskie beer and listening to the Polish Blues band Don't Shoot the Pianist we headed back to the B&B.

Below is another picture that shows a little bit of our B&B, and also the antenna on the roof.  By my count the top of the antenna is located over 35 ft AGL - and in this case, size does matter!

Official Facebook page for the Contest

You can find lots of updates, including the daily task sheets on the competition facebook page at:

https://www.facebook.com/wgc2014leszno

Tonight, the opening ceremony will take place in the Central Square in Leszno.  We'll have Maria's pictures from the ceremony up in the gallery soon.

We have now conducted short range tests of both the car antenna and big antenna at the B&B and transmissions are LOUD and CLEAR out to 50 km.

I am having some car issues, yesterday, the check engine light came on so Jarek is now at a shop with my car trying to resolve the problem.  Hopefully, it will be something they can fix today!

Dave

HD Report

Due to poor weather we didn't fly today. I had opportunity to solve all problems with my instruments, but no chance to test them I hope to have chance to fly tomorrow and check if all works.Sunday is the first contest day.
Jerzy 

Photo Gallery

Both Maria and Jarek are posting pictures to a Photo Gallery that you can find by clicking on the permanent link in the menu bar at the left side of the page.  This will open the gallery in a new window so that you don't lose your place in the blog.

HD Inspection Day

I was one of the last pilots going through inspection
It was raining since early morning, we filled glider with full water around 4PM and later around

6:30PM moved HD in to hangar with scales. Whole process took  around 30 minutes. Now we are legal in all aspects and ready for competition








Diana2 pilots had to dump 10 to 20 liters of water to be in weight specification, I had to dump only 2 liters .
Jerzy

The tallest team antenna in Leszno

Today is a rain day, that we had also planned as a rest day after flying the last two practise days.  On the agenda for today was to mount the antenna for the team base station.  After looking around the B&B, it became obvious that the best location would be on the roof along with all the other antennas.  The girls wouldn't let us climb on the roof, so after a conversation with the owner of the B&B we called her antenna guy last night and this morning at 9 am he arrived in the rain with his truck and ladder to mount our antenna.

 I imagine the roof was just a little bit slippery, but he climbed it like an expert  Although I think there was a little hesitation when he first got up there.

 He attached our antenna to the top of the other antennas on the roof.

So we now have the tallest team antenna in Leszno !  In Uvalde, we had the antenna mounted on the second floor balcony of the hotel and we had a range of about 175 km with the base station.  With this roof mount, the antenna is about 30 ft higher than we were in Uvalde and it has an unobstructed view of the the task area in all directions.  We'll report back later what kind of range we are getting.

HD day 3

Today we had 2.5 h task due to bad weather approaching.
Task was set right on as we had final glide trough rain showers and no more thermals after finish.
Our team manager Jarek takes great care of our problems all is set perfect including his help with tasting local drinks.We have Przemek and Michal helping us with all  the heavy work so we can concentrate on flying.

Dave's Training Day 2

Today the 15 m class had a 2.5 hr area task that sent us north first.  The weather man predicted that it would be raining at Leszno by 3-4 pm.  As it turned out, the system moved a little faster than expected and the rain started around 2 pm.  The system moved from east to west, which is a little different compared to what we are accustomed with systems moving from the west.  The task sent us into really good air and I averaged 4.9 kt thermals for the day and flew 333 km at 128 km/hr.

The first leg to the north was nice with a sky full of cu as seen in the picture below ( it seems the camera auto focus, focused on the canopy instead of the clouds in the distance so excuse the fuzziness)

The next picture shows a little bit of the countryside.

I had no real problem spots during the flight, but on the way home I had to cross the line of showers about 30 km west of Leszno.  Being a practice day, I stopped and climbed to about 1000 ft over a 5 kt glide, just in case.

In the picture, you can see another glider just ahead and below me as we cross through a gap in the rain on our way back.  The next picture shows the view out the other side at that time as well.

The flight route and barograph are shown below.  Once again the airspace that I flew through was not active today.

Training day 2

For day two organizers setup time tasks.

For 15M class:

15 M task

For 18M class

18M class

Weather looks good, there's some possibilities of rain this afternoon that may impact returns.

Dave was out at 12:31 local time< Jerzy few minutes behind him.

Results from day one are posted on WGC page

http://www.wgc2014.hb.pl/wyniki/15m/47N_15m.htm for 15M

http://www.wgc2014.hb.pl/wyniki/18m/47N_18m.htm for 18M

Few pictures from today (larger format that i posted yesterday)

HD Practce Day Two

I started day with my instruments work then I wasn't able to find battery bracket so we had to remove seat pan to check it, but no luck then I found that bracket is installed but slides in to hidden compartment and no way to see it.
I launched as one of the last pilots and started at 2Pm for 522km task
I had good run to first TP but then speed went down due to very strong head wind.
On third and forth leg I flew over 100km without turn and ended up just 300m AGL as no trace of cloud .
I found 2m/s lift and went for final glide from 69km . 35 km from finish line I had 300m reserve which went to 0 at the edge of the field due to heavy sink and head wind.
Tomorrow I plan to work on my instruments and fly the task task.
Jerzy

Training Day 1 - Task sheets

PDF of 15 m class task

PDF of 18 m class task

Dave's Training Day 1

Today we had a 500 km task for practice and I flew it in 4.3 hrs at 115 km/hr.  The route and barograph traces are shown below

The lift was quite good at times and I averaged 4.3 kt over the task.  My best climbs were over 7 kts and I also had to take some weak thermals in places to keep moving forward without dropping too low.  The third leg (that runs from the NE down to the SW near the red restricted airspace crossed two rivers and there were large holes associated with the rivers.

The barograph trace shows the low spots and high spots along the third leg where I was down to 4000 ft, but then had a nice 5.3 kt climb for a 3000 ft gain.

The other thing you will see in the route picture above is the airspace that we have to deal with.  To make things more interesting, some of the zones open and close on a daily, or time basis.  For example, today, where my first leg crosses the control zone NE of Zielona Gora, it was inactive from 1030-1630, so we could fly though it.  So, both the LX and Oudie were going nuts warning me about it and I couldn't dismiss it for the day since the third leg had the chance to get close to it after 1630.

All in all, it was a good first training day and all the instrument and glider systems seemed to work!

WGC 2014 - first official training day

Greeting from Leszno on the 22nd July. First official training day.

At this moment Dave passed technical inspection (yesterday) and is ready, Jerzy is still tweaking his machine. 

Task for the day:

15 M - (yellow on picture) - 504 km

18 M - (blue sheet) - 522 km.

Both glider with water, sky looks very promising.

Grid time 11, first launch 11:10.

Weather - see pictures:-)

Best regards

Jarek Twardowski

Team Captian

Leszno first flight HD

Every glider has different  instrument set up
I'm trying to install some of my instruments
I  spent 6 hours to do that and I didn't finish as yet
But I was able to do short test flight and test engine ,bug wipers and instruments
I have some work to do tomorrow and hope to fly with water
Jerzy

Technical Inspection

Today there was high cirrus that kept the temperature down, but the weather man predicted lift under the cirrus.  After a lousy sleep last night I elected not to fly today, but instead went through the technical inspection.  Some did fly and were able to complete the practise task.

The inspection involves measuring the wing span of the glider to ensure that it conforms to the IGC class specification, checking the cockpit for cloud flying instruments and to ensure that all items such as PDA's are securely mounted.  After all of this is done, the glider is weighed in flying condition to check against the max allowable weight for your glider.  Each day on the way to the grid, all gliders will be weighed to ensure they are below MTOW.  To do this, the glider is weighed as described above at MTOW, and then tail dolly, wing dolly and tow bar are added and the glider is connected to the car and the main wheel weight is recorded.  As long as you are below this tow out weight each day, then theoretically, you are also below MTOW.

Back to the topic of the lousy sleep last night.  Our B&B is not air conditioned and yesterday was about 34 C and our room was HOT.  We opened the window, but for some reason they don't believe in screens in the window here in Europe, so then the mosquitoes started to join us around dusk.  We closed the window, but then it was hot again.  Finally, around 11 PM we could open the window and the mosquitoes were gone, but it was still hot and the road noise of cars and trucks and tractors and motorcycles and just about everything else just didn't quit until around 3 am and then started up again around 6 am.

Today, Jarek bought oscillating fans for everyone and we also added an insect repellent strip that will hopefully deter them from entering the room and we can have a good nights rest in advance of the first official training day tomorrow.

Arrived in Leszno

The team is now complete in Leszno.  Virginia and I drove in from Poppenhausen - 625 km and 8 1/2 hours.  The autobahns through Germany were good and we averaged around 95 km.hr for that portion of the trip with our little Fiat Doblo.  The Fiat does not have much power but also doesn't burn too much fuel.  It took about 3/4 of a tank to get here with the trailer in tow.

When we crossed the border into Poland, we called Jerzy who had arrived in Leszno from Jelenia Gora around 1430.

By the time we arrived at 1800, Jerzy had staked out our glider parking spaces and gone through the registration process.

He shepherded me through registration and then we headed back to our B&B where we met up with Polish crew members, a couple of University students from Bielsko.

We had a good dinner of home-cooked food and finally, our Team Captain Jarek arrived with Jerzy's glider in tow around 8:30.  So we are now all on site and Jerzy and I are registered and it looks like a flying day tomorrow,