British Gliding Team win in Australia with WinPilot
In January 2001
three young British glider pilots flew to the top of the 1st Club
Class World Gliding Championships held at Gawler, South Australia. 25 year old
Peter Masson became the first World Champion in the Club Class, beating 43 other
pilots over 8 days of tight racing, with team mates Richard Hood 2nd
and Afandi Darlington 4th. The British Team were kindly sponsored by
Sierra SkyWare, Inc. and Crabb Computing (www.crabcom.demon.co.uk)
who supplied WinPilot Advanced, running on Compaq 1500 series palmtop computers.
Afandi Darlington
writes - The type of tasks we flew at Gawler were exclusively Pilot Selected
Tasks (PST) and Assigned Area Tasks (AAT), no racing triangles that we are
normally used to. PST tasks were usually set with a compulsory first turning
point and a time limit of around 4 hours. Flights could last longer than the
minimum time but this tactic was only worthwhile if overall average speed could
be increased. We found that the large WinPilot moving map display made
orientation in the nest of turnpoints (figure 1) easier, and the easy ‘Tap and
GoTo’ function in WinPilot 2.12 allows rapid reselection of turnpoints
in-flight with minimum head-down time.
Flying the AAT tasks
was also easier with WinPilot as the position of the glider within the sector
constantly displayed. This allows more informed choices over which route or
cloud street to fly down, and when to turn towards the next sector.
Flight planning is made easy on the ground with the task editor in WinPilot, simplifying ‘what if’ planning of PSTs in particular. Planning the end game of a PST involves setting up options towards the end of the flight to engineer a finish at the end of the PST time window. Typically this involves planning 3 or 4 options that can be taken during the flight, depending on how fast the flight is developing. In really good weather you will fly further in the time window, so need a longer flight planned to take advantage of this. Alternatively if the weather goes bad on you you’ll need a minimum task planned to get you back as soon as possible. We found WinPilot a flexible tool for task planning both on the ground and in the air.
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| Cups and medals! | Close team flying in the blue |
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| Turnpoint map from Gawler, South Australia |