Twisted: Aerobatics FUUN

Monday, 10 September 2018

Aerobatics FUUN

After winning the Club grade earlier this year I decided to make the move up to Sports grade. Although that didn't mean I had practised anything since April before entering this latest comp.

I hadn't even looked at the Known sequence until 2 weeks before this comp but still decided to enter anyway and treat it as a learning/training exercise.

So an intense 2 weeks of practise followed with me trying to fly every day (British weather permitting). First off learning the manoeuvres that were new to me and then trying to put everything together in the sequence and practise it with different weather/wind conditions. After that I focussed on practising UnKnown sequences - something I'd never done before.

At the comp I had the misfortune to pick 2nd out of the hat for the flying order so I wasn't able to learn anything each time from watching the other competitors before me.

The first sequence was a low overall score for me, I got massively off heading on the first figure and then hard zeroed the second and third figures as a result of that. Despite flying the rest of the sequence quite well it was impossible to recover from those early errors. A small mistake costs you dearly in Aerobatics.

Staying with my earlier theme, in the two UnKnown sequences, I managed to hard zero the highest scoring figures again! This hurt my score a lot but I still managed to finish in 6th (from 13) and 7th respectively so that made me feel not so bad at all. I had expected to be in the bottom 5 for the whole comp and to have two flights finishing in the middle of the pack was better than I expected.

Where the Twister is most lacking is in the Immelman where it loses lots of energy so the roll off the top always looks a bit 'soft'. I have tried to enter this figure faster and pull harder at the beginning and that seemed to help but an Extra 200 it is not.

I had a lot of fun and learnt a lot from the two days. I'll have a more serious attempt next year.

Sequence cards, videos and results of each sequence flown are below.