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26.7.2013 Friday – Hot last practice day, almost finished

The briefing tables were turned 90 degrees and the slideshow is now on the back wall. Also we have better projector and tables were yesterday signed for each country. Preparations are almost done, there were only few gliders which were waiting for the technical inspection, and only few pilots and couple of team captains had to register. When those are done we are even closer being ready for the championships and real action.

I went in the grid to take some pictures, the weather was really hot already then – and it was only 12:00 o’clock. Tasks were 299 and 358 km, I think almost all pilots went flying.

Many pilots were happy after their flights, few of them said this was some of the best weather they had flown – in Poland.

Edit: Ailsa (YU) from Australia had lost all power during the flight. Flight recorder has separate battery, but all other equipments were just dead during the rest of the flight. So she had to land without a radio. Beryl, the Australian team captain had asked why she didn’t call her, so they would know that she was landing. Hmm…because the phone had dropped from her pocket when she sat in the glider and the phone had slipped under the seat. Hmm…if things start to go wrong, it goes really wrong. She was anyway laughing when she told this story.

Unfortunately you can see from the results that six pilots will start their championships with minus points, not much, as they got only 25 or 50 penalty points each, most of them were because of crossing the road too low. There is a road going by the airfield, and the finish line crosses the road, so organization hopes for higher finishes.

It’s good that we have so many links to different blogs, you can see from there what is going on. UK blog revealed that they were going to “let their hair down” this evening, as Saturday will be opening ceremony and that won’t be a flying day, and on Sunday everybody wants to be in good shape for the first flying day.

There are always some pranks in the international gliding competitions, usually those have something to do with the flags, especially the FAI flag. Little birds told me that flags were the target last night as well, but plans were ruined by the airfield security.

Remember, you can’t steal the FAI flag before the last night, that’s written in Annex Z.

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