Day 2 - Saturday 9 June

The initial weather forecast seemed to be right as the weather was (slightly) better, but in the morning the rain was replaced with mist, so it was waiting time again until the first F3A flight could take place at 10:30 a.m.

The initial plan was to have A-A Preliminary during the judge's noon break and fly the first round to music after completion of the F3A round. As it turned out, pilots asked for a continuous F3A flying as they felt it was difficult for them switching their mind to a completely different schedule and revert to F3A thereafter. So the decision was made to fly Artistic Aerobatics Preliminary and first Qualifying round in a row after the F3A round was complete. Although this proved unfortunate for some spectators who had travelled from far away and could not wait until the evening, in the end it proved a wise decision and made for spectacular flying. Meanwhile the weather was very slowly improving, and at 6:15 p.m. when we were ready beginning Artistic Aerobatics we could even (almost) see patches of sky behind the cloud cover. The wind had dropped to almost nothing.

Less than half an hour before that point a Belgian F3A competitor, Yves Van Gompel, asked whether he could register and fly in the A-A competition. As one seat was free, this was accepted but now, we had to find some freestyle music for him. Back to the computer and my collection of ready-prepared songs, which he went through quickly. Once the music piece was chosen, a CD was burned and Yves left for his car where he could listen at least a couple of times to the two pieces (the compulsory and the freestyle ones) before actually flying with his regular F3A plane, a ZN-Line Fashion. As if it was not enough, he also had to go through the Preliminary pattern, but this was not an impossible task as it is made of only 5 manoeuvres, albeit sometimes complex to remember at first glance.

Preliminary Round
For this one a starting order was produced by a random draw and Marco Benincasa earned the honour being the very first pilot to fly the first round in the very first Artistic Aerobatics competition. The judge's panel was made of two FAI international judges, Alex Goossens (Belgium) and Pierre Pignot (France) and an experienced F3A-X/Large Scale Aerobatics judge Jean-Jacques Billeau (France).The Preliminary schedule proved up to the task. The first manoeuvres were easily flown by everybody, although nobody succeeded really well with the rolling circle (1/2 circle with 1 outside & ½ inside rolls) and the final rolls combination sent everybody out of track at the snap from knife edge to knife edge. Quique Somenzini won the round, closely followed with Christophe Paysant-Le Roux and, surprise, young Stephane Carrier.

Qualification round to music
After the last Preliminary flight was complete, it took only a few minutes to get the results and, according to the rules, the starting order for the next round, which was to begin with the 2-minute to compulsory music. 4 of the pilots had chosen compulsory # 1, the two other, of course, # 2.
Remember, flights are judged on precision as well as variety and synchronisation to music. There Christophe got a clear margin over Quique with Marco not very far behind. Even while preparing the F3A World champs did not leave much time for training, it was clear that their experience of flying to music at several competitions proved a clear advantage, in addition to the factthat they are outstanding champions. But it was also interesting to note that Yves did a really commendable job at trying to follow the rhythm without any previous practice. An interesting remark was that his regular Fashion F3A plane was definitely not at a disadvantage. Although the control throws did not allow him any 3-D manoeuvre, he succeeded improvising even to the point of attempting manoeuvres he had never done before!

The scores were :

Flying to the competitor's own music for the second flight of this round proved rather different. I had already noticed at the various IAM competitions in Japan that pilots were usually - if not always - more successful with the compulsory music than with the one they had themselves chosen. The same happened this time. Curiously enough both Quique and Christophe had chosen for their free music South American songs, but of different styles, Quique's one being a tad more lively. Unfortunately both of them made the full length of their flight on a single piece of music devoid of any marked change in rhythm. The result : a low artistic quality score. If sticking to the music they were losing on criterion 3 (contrasting periods of graceful and dynamic flying), if alternating flight styles they were losing on criterion 1 (synchronisation with the music). In the end it was very close, but Quique scored a little bit higher on general impression, winning the round.

Day 2 Final Positions:

With all flights lasting about 3 minutes from take off to landing the turnover was very high, keeping spectators constantly interested. All the F3A pilots were staying silent and watching with great attention. For the pilots it was obviously extremely rewarding hearing applause and roars of appreciation during their flights. Establishing the flight order according to the current classification obviously worked very well as we could feel the tension rising among the spectators up to the very last flights.

So the day was over. Finals were to take place on the following day.

Introduction & Day One

Picture Gallery

Day Three and Conclusion