2008 AOCC
May 25 thru 31, 2008 – Cebu City, Philippines
Cebu, in the Philippines, was the host town to another successful, “in between the World champs” F3C Helicopter competition! The competition ran from May 25 to May 31 and attracted 18 competitors with Manabu Hashimito from Japan being the defending champion. Pilots were representing a diverse range of countries including; Australia, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Chines Taipei and Thailand.
The headquarters for the event was at the luxurious Marco Polo and I am sure that teams staying there had a wonderful time. Officials and judges arrived a couple of days prior to the comp and we were rather concerned about the weather! Each day, heavy showers persisted from lunchtime onwards, despite the fact that it was meant to be the pre monsoonal time of the year. In fact, there were suggestions that a typhoon may be on its way (as it turned out, that occurred 3 weeks after the comp!). With all the rain, the competition sight was very muddy, but thanks to the city council, plenty of gravel was delivered, making the area quite OK for the comps. As it turned out, the Gods were kind to all of us as the rains fell elsewhere, during the comps! Most days the winds were persisting cross winds, but ironically, it did not seem to worry the pilots too much!!
Pre Registration and model processing, Horace Hagen (FAI/CIAM F3C S/C) conducted a helpful Judges Training Course, for all involved. A number of interesting points emerged from this Training Course, which, if heeded during the comps, allowed pilots to gain higher points.
1. All aerobatic manoeuvres commence and finish with a min of 10m run-in. This 10 m run-in must be straight and horizontal. It’s not uncommon to find pilots “diving” their models into the manoeuvre in order to gain higher speeds.
2. On take offs most good pilots get their helicopters up to the prerequisite eye level smoothly and vertically. However the same does not necessarily apply on landing! Often the pilot lowers his heli in small stages and or brings his heli to a hover, prior to landing. Each of these small mistakes could cost 1?2 to1 point!
3. Stall turns such as in “Double Rolling Stall” need to be done with the stall pirouette being symmetrical. Half of the rotation is performed before the vertical stop and the other half, after the stop. A good number of pilots performed the 180 degree pirouette after the helicopter maxed out on the vertical! This was surprising as this point was clearly explained at Judges Training Course. Erring pilots lost plenty of points on this one, especially because the mistake was performed twice in the same “double stalling” manoeuvre! In this particular manoeuvre it was also quite rear to see the vertical climbing part and the vertical diving part being parallel!
4. 4. Judging from the way pilots perform the autorotation it is clear that there is little understanding as how to maximise your score. There are far too many pilots who do their darnest to hit the central helipad, come what may! The rules state that “stretching” the flight path of the helicopter in order to arrive at the central helipad, will result in a downgrade, its severity being proportional to the stretch. A stretched autorotation landing on the central helipad, should never score higher than the same autorotation performed that lands without a stretch outside the central helipad.
To try and explain further, let’s take a hypothetical example. You perform a relatively good autorotation, but which is a bit short of the helipad. In order to avoid stretching, you land outside the 3m circle. The max points that you can attain for being outside the 3 m circle is 6 points. However, a judge may have judged the overall manoeuvre to be worth 7pts out of 10, so to calculate the actual score he would award you 6×7 which is 35 or 3.5 points. Now consider the same manoeuvre done with a stretch to the central1 m heli pad. A Judge would see that the heli should have landed outside the 3m circle (max 6 pts possible), but pilot stretched manoeuvre badly and receives an additional downgrade of 2 points. Now, the manoeuvre is marked not out of the previous max of 6 points, but out of 6-2=4. Now the final score is 4×7=28 and rounded off, the pilot gets only 3pts for his auto. This is a lower score, even though he landed on the central helipad!
Attention to these four points mentioned, should yield a better score for any aspiring F3C pilot. Of course if you really want to improve your flying, please study the “F3C Judges Guide” and get a good idea as to what the judges are expecting.
There were a few surprises during the comp. During flying of Schedule C, one of the top level pilots “forgot” to fly one of the aerobatic manoeuvres, and flew the following manoeuvre. Then realising his mistake, he flew the same manoeuvre again!! He got zero for his first go, as the manoeuvre performed was not as described! A pleasant surprise was that the pilots were not too fussed with the winds that were often at 90 degree to the flight line. In addition, the shape of most autorotation was quite good, despite having a downwind component! Reliability of models was of a high order, with not one crash during the course of the competition, nor was there any in flight engine failures! And what was the worst performed manoeuvre? Surprising it was a “hovering” manoeuvre called the “Vertical Spike”. This, amongst other things, requires a pilot to perform an inverted nose in hovering at height, with 3 x 90 degree quadrants! Even some of the top pilots had difficulty with this one, whilst some lesser pilots got zeros for getting way out of shape!
All in all a good competition, that was well run and I am sure enjoyed by all!
Happy Flying
Nick Csabafy
