Free Flight European Flight Championships
In the F1C power class, team GBR have won the Team Silver medal!
Alan Jack (7th) and Stafford Screen (9th) made the fly-offs while Peter Watson (12th) just missed, dropping a mere 8 seconds in 22:00 minutes flying time over seven flights.
In F1A (glider) both Chris Edge (18th) and Mike Cook (19th) made the fly-off while
Peter Williams dropped 30 seconds to place 49th. The Team made 5th place – top of the teams who didn’t get all three into the fly-offs – the standard at these events is very high indeed!
In F1B (
Wakefield – rubber powered) our luck was out. Russ Peers dropped 20 seconds to place 33rd, Peter Martin dropped 27 seconds to place 36th and Ray Jones dropped a total of 83 seconds over two flights for 55th. Ray was 5th in the World Champs in 2005 so we know he had a bad day here!
The nine team members made a total of 63 flights, scoring 56 maximum scores and dropping an average of 24 seconds in each of the other 7 flights. When they are not flying, team members are lift spotting or retrieving and had to work very hard in high temperatures over less than ideal terrain.
But all were rewarded!
Team GBR are thrilled to announce that they were declared winners of the Jack North Trophy for the overall best team at the European Free Flight Championships. The Trophy was presented to the FAI by the BMFA about ten years ago in memory of Jack North. Jack was a Croydon club member and famous Free Flight expert, who represented GBR four times between 1952 and 1967. He appeared twice in glider and once each in rubber and power. In his day job, Jack was a well known professional aerodynamicist.
Mike Fantham FSMAE