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Old February 13th 14, 04:03 AM posted to rec.aviation.soaring
JS
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Default Australian 750 km triangle record - Team Flying

Here is a forward from the [Aus-Soaring] newsgroup, posted by Matt Gage.
He and Allan flew the task together extremely well. Seems to me that for the most part, the US team has a lot to learn about pair (team) flying. At Uvalde, I only noticed good pair flying results in the open class.
"Pam" is Pam Kurstjens, the Australian FAI record keeper.
Some of you may have met Pam and her husband Gerritt on a US flying tour with their Nimbus 4s about a decade ago.
"Wombat" is Mike Cleaver, who had first posted to [Aus-Soaring] that this was a training flight.
You may have met Allan when he came to the USA during Australian winter to buy that LS8 and fly it at as many places as he could. Hmmm, sounds like a chapter out of Moffatt's book "Winning".
I have met Allan several times, and he is a strong competition pilot. Yet to meet Matt. I don't think he is a high time pilot but he seems to really get it. Intuition. Wasn't that another chapter of "Winning"?
By the way, I cross-posted Sean's video link to the Australians.
Jim
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Unlike Australian comps, there is nothing in the sporting code (which governs records) that suggests the flights can't be done pair flying, or even receiving weather or condition information from multiple locations to assist decision making.

Additionally, I believe that Pam actually contacted the IGC for clarification on this before posting the notification.

For those that like to know where the task was, TP1 was an arbitrary GPS point midway between Ivanhoe and Balranald - there's nothing there, so nothing to name it after !

Wombat is correct in that we were using this flight as a training exercise for the worlds, this was actually the 2nd record attempt in the week we spent together - we fell well short of Peter Temple's new 750k o/r record a few days earlier.

We were wingtip to wingtip at both the start and finish, although for much of the flight, this wasn't the case as we repeatedly had one then the other get separated vertically and the had to work hard to pull the low one back up without slowing the high one - very good training for us. The intention was to try and do this jointly, although, if one of us had been clearly ahead at the finish, they were not going to wait !

For others thinking of doing the same, you are not going to be able to pair fly effectively without a lot of practice, equivalent gliders at the same wing loading and a similar flying style - we had this, and had almost no disagreement over thermal strengths to use, height bands, speed to fly, tracks in both the blue and with Cu, etc.

Over the week, we flew for over 30 hours together over about 3,500 km. This particular flight was on the last day.

Finally, we need to apologise to everyone affected by the huge amount of radio traffic between us last week

Matt