Status of WBC 2014 (as of May 5th, 2014)

Submitted by Fred Hermanspann on Tue, 05/06/2014 - 11:59

eGlidepath

After a wet February and the wettest March on record, April of this year gave us finally some more soaring-friendly weather, making for a slow beginning of this year's XC season on the west side. Best days so far were April 26 and 28 with Dan Housler and Ron Clark posting the highest scoring OLC flights yet of about 450 points.

So here is the current status of the WBC 2014 (as of 5/5/2014):

Name	Points	Date	Sailplane	6 leg dist. - km	tri dist. - km
Dan Housler	450.3	4-28	Cirrus 17.7	413.7	121.9
Ron Clark	449.0	4-26	LS-3	439.6	136.0
Brad Hill	417.7	4-28	Tetra-15	372.4	262.3
F. Hermanspann	366.3	4-29	Chinook	292.6	221.1
Tim Heneghan	219.8	4-9	ASH-26E	212.6	148.8
Movses Babayan	195.6	4-28	G-102	173.2	97.2
Marty Gibbins	176.6	4-26	ASW-19	150.9	85.8
Thomas V d Velde	131.9	4-26	L-33	96.9	55.1
Dan Teifke	112.9	4-26	ASW-19	99.5	44.7
Travis Brown	91.9	3-21	Krokus	92.8	15.3

Some pilots have now started to post their flights on skylines-project.org which analyses the flight performance according to the same rules as the OLC. The results are almost identical; for example Dan Housler's flight gets 0.1 points less on skylines than on OLC and Ron would get 0.3 points less. That is close enough so far to ignore even if our two front runners are only 1.3 points apart. While Dan Housler has currently the lead in points , Ron Clark had the longest flights in distance and duration ( 6:25 hours!) and Brad flew the longest FAI triangle. A little competition goes a long way to raise the standards of XC flying!

As we approach the best conditions for XC flying (last year's best day was May 14) we can expect some more outstanding entries and I hope that some of our newer XC pilots will contribute enthusiastically to this list.