Airpark Elite Sweeps Mile Hi Madness III

September 30^th and October 1^st were cold rainy days, so no one was sure what was in store for Saturday October 2^nd in Aurora.   Weather.com said it should be 41 and cloudy at 6 am, 50 and partly cloudy by 9 am and 70 and sunny by noon.  For once, anyway, the weather man was right!  What a perfectly gorgeous fall day  for combat in Colorado.  You could not have asked for a better day!

We started Open B with 9 pilots at 10 am.  Of these, 5 were first time combaters, and one was flying his second ever meet, and one who has not flown any combat since the middle of last season.  Alan Thovson flew in his second ever meets, and he flew them in two consecutive weeks! It was really good to see the new blood on the line.  I think they all did very well and I hope to see all of them back again!

I had given Frank Scharnell IV an experimental design to build, and Frank built it very well.  The week before Madness III, we tried to fly the experimental plane.  Let us just say that the experiment failed and leave it at that.  That meant that Frank (Quad) did not have a plane for Madness III, so I set up one of my Go Devils on another channel and let him fly it for the day.  We will hear more about that later.  Quad did very well in his first ever combat meet.

Frank ScharnellI and Rick Scharnell both flew in their first combat meets as well.  The Scharnell’s had come out to the Rocky Mountain Nationals and worked as judges, so they had some idea what they were up against.  All flew very well in spite of equipment troubles all day.

Airpark Elite came out in force!  There were 5 pilots there from Airpark.  I thought Airpark was supposed to have a Fun-Fly, but I think they just moved the Fun-Fly to Mile Hi and called it combat.  Thanks Airpark for coming and combating with us.

We had a lot of help from the other Mile Hi members who worked as Judges and Line Marshal!  Without these people, we could not have had a competition at all, let alone a very good one.  Thanks guys for all of your hard work and help!

We flew six rounds of Open B.  There were not enough to fly scale, so we were done pretty early.  The CD was set for 10 minutes between “Stop Combat” and “Start Engines”, so it was fairly fast paced.  I know of one round that by the time I had retrieved my plane from the next county, there was only 4 minutes to Start Engines.  I really had to hustle to get everything ready.

As we got started, I was helping Quad get his Go Devil fueled (he had never run a bubble less tank before), started and launched before I went to my own plane.  I learned a lot about what it takes to get two planes in the air in 90 seconds.  I don’t think I got “up on time” points all day long.  Frank III and Rick were going through the same ordeal down on their end trying to keep two planes ready to go and in the air.  BTW, did I mention that Frank Scharnell III was 40 on Friday?  Well the Old Man still has some moves left in him, and he fought hard when he could get his avenger with a sick magnum on stock muffler in the air. 

Time and rounds took some attrition.  By the end of round 6, there were only two planes in the air, and it took me about 4 minutes into the round to get the second plane up.  There were more than that at the beginning of the round, but I don’t know what happened to them.

Round 4 was pretty interesting for me.  I was up and having a pretty good round, for me anyway, I had a streamer on my wing and still had my money streamer.  When I was looked away for a new target, and looked back, I thought “What happened to the streamer on my wing Surly it did not fall off.  Oh well lets see what we can do.  Loop, I did not turn right! Why did my plane snap out like that?  What maneuver was that, I DID NOT DO THAT”.  About that time my judge says “uh you went down over there, you can quit flying the other plane now!”  How humiliating!!!!!  I lost my plane, and since I have two in the air that look just alike, when I looked away and back, I picked up on the plane Quad was flying and it took way too long to figure out that I was not controlling the one I should be.  I am extremely thankful that the combat arena was out there a ways and the plane did not come anywhere close to the line.  That is a potentially very dangerous situation and could have caused LOTS of problems.  I only bring it up to remind us how easy it is to loose a plane in the air and create a potentially dangerous situation.  We constantly have to be aware of safety!  It is much easier when you have two identical planes in the air at the same time

Well enough Rambling.  At the end of the day, the scores looked like this:

Tom Neff                    1240

Brian Neff                   1120

Alan Thoveson             760

That is an Airpark Sweep!!!!!

Now the rest of us

Frank Scharnell IV     700

George Kerr              700

Frank Scharnell III      180

Rick Scharnell           100

Clu Colvin                      40

Kurt Bozarth               Equipment troubles and did not get his plane up all day.

Kurt, I hope you come back and give it another go!  It is as much fun as Pylon for sure.  Clu had a tough day as well, but I hope you came back and fly with us some more.

Isn’t amazing that Quad and I both got the same score with nearly identical airplanes?  Quad should have had a better score, but I botched one of his launches when the string got caught on my finger and put his nose into the runway!

Thanks to all the Airpark pilots for coming to Mile Hi and flying some combat with us!  We enjoyed having you and enjoyed getting to Airpark this season for some combat as well!

Thanks to all the volunteers that helped out:

Chuck Brant, Bob Bergin, Scott Graczyk, Bill Fleck, Chris Martin, Joe Ortiz, Roy Olsen, Mile Palmar, Jan Scharnell, Bill Sorrells, Mark Johnston.  If I have left any one out, please let me know.  I want to recognize all those who helped.

Tom Neff 1^st Place

Brian Neff 2^nd Place

Alan Thovson 3^Rd Place

Till next season,

George