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The Hong Kong Radio Control Soaring Society has organized a dynamic
soaring contest
on Sunday, 7, December 2008. This is the first DS contest
successfully held. Although attempts to hold DS contests have been tried
before, no contest was successfully run so far due to poor weather and
safety consideration of the DSing sites This time the venue
to hold this DS contest was
Fei Ngo Shan east-facing slope, which is well known for DSing in
Hong Kong. There are not many DS capable slopes in Hong Kong, Fei Ngo
Shan's DS slope is good for strong easterly wind, however, due to its
limitation in backside space and a ridge nearby, its achievable upper
speed record is expected to be rather limited. Originally, the organizer expected to attract at least 8 diehard DS pilots to join the contest, unfortunately only 4 pilots dared to come! Anyway, the contest was started at about 2:00pm with wind speed varied from 3m/s to 8m/s. Two classes of contests were run; the first class is a foamy class, and the second class is an open class. Five rounds of contest in each class were conducted. In each round, a pilot has 60 seconds to gain high to enter DS track. Once entered, the glider has to complete 20 circles. The maximum speed obtained from this 20-circle run was recorded as the score. We used the ProSpeed radar gun to measure the glider speed in air during the DS run. In the foamy class, only Bee and Beevolution (newer version of Bee) were used. It was supposed that Beevolution can achieve a highest terminal speed than its elder sister. But it proved not to be necessary true! Ah Pong took the first round with 51.1 mile per hour flying Stanley's Bee. Lee Man and Ah So flew their Beevolutions with minimum success. It seemed that Beevolution is not that easy to control during the DS run.. Stanley took the second, third and forth runs with some margins. Lee Man got two DNFs as a result of crashes after launch, bad luck! It seemed that his plane was off tuned for the day! Finally, Stanley won the foamy class contest, followed by Ah Pong who again complained that there was no prize available for the second place. In the open class, Stanley and Ah Pong used their 3m F3F planes for
the contest while Ah So and Lee Man used the 60" MiniNYX. There is an
obvious advantage in using bigger planes for DS. So it would be a match
between Stanley and Ah Pong, although Lee Man did his best to win one
round using his 60". The wind died down significantly during the open
class contest. The pilots even had difficult to gain sufficient height
to kick start the DS run. Anyway, Stanley took the first round with 96.7
mile per hour by flying his carbon NYX F3F, the wind at that time was
still quite ok, so it was a good run. Even though the plane is a strong
carbon version, it did flex a bit during highspeed penetration into the
separation layer. Ah Pong followed with a 86.6 mile per hour. His Lanita
is well-known to be really strong and indeed it was and no flexing of
wing was observed. However, it seemed that it took more circles for the
Lanita to build up speed. The contest drew to conclude with Stanley
taking a 70 mile per hour at the last round. He won the contest again
for the open class. Congratulation! Here are the results: |
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