We had a warning last night - '14's Volkslogger was set to record at >10s intervals. We made sure that was fixed for today.
They make extensive use of overhead screens while briefing. There are two large screens. Typically one will have a slide show of photos or video taken the previous day. The other is used for the met, and the task briefing.
The Met briefing starts with a funny picture, usually involving a frog. Uwe's bio on the web site shows him with a stuffed frog. Must be some in joke about Uwe and frogs, possibly involving rain? He then uses the projector to show a wind map, a moving satellite/cloud picture over several hours, a weather chart showing the isobars, also updating over several hours and colour coded, and a temp trace. References are made to the data using a laser pointer. Shame I can't understand it!
A 368km flight was set for Standard Class as the A task, with a B task of 304km. We were first on the grid so we had a quick team meeting before going out to the waiting gliders.
There is one less glider in the competition this morning since a Russian contestant flying an LS6 has withdrawn.
We launched the girls into a mostly blue sky with shallow small clouds. Looked almost like an Australian day.
Since the task was long, Keith and I were able to go to Bautzen to get some jobs done including some shopping, post some letters, recharge phone cards, etc.
The first gliders started arriving home around 4:30 pm. Since ours had started at 12:59, we expected them within the half-hour. 5:00pm came and went and still no LS4's. We could here them on the radio and realised conditions had deteriorated on the last leg as the day was shutting down. They were in survival mode.
We waited patiently and at about 5:15pm, both LS4's arrived safely on the airfield.
Unfortunately not everyone landed safely. A Ventus 2 was warned on late final about the lack of undercarriage, but it was too late for the pilot to safely lower the undercarriage so the glider impacted the ground heavily. The pilot was taken to hospital to be checked. The glider will be towed the the Schempp-Hirth factory for repairs.
The pilot is not automatically out of the competition. She was released from hospital and since the accident was after the finish-line, not during the competition, she can fly a replacement glider if one is available.
Sonja, one of our crew, also received bad news. She has worked as a tug pilot at Benalla so knew the pilot involved in the accident near there.
During the post flight debriefing, the girls where worried that they may have misread the map and infringed Dresden airspace. We looked at the traces (Trotter and Turner) in Seeyou and it appeared that it could be the case. While we were still debriefing, the contest director arrived looking serious.
He sat down with us and explained that he had bad news and he felt it should be delivered personally. He brought the printouts that showed that the girls had indeed infringed the airspace by approximately 100m.
This meant they would have a technical outlanding at that point.
To soften the blow, he presented them with a bottle of red wine made near his home in southern Germany.
We were touched by his thoughtfulness in deciding to break the news himself, and were blown away by the gift of the wine. This is just another example of how terrific, supportive and helpful the organisers of the contest have been.
We finished the day by being invited to a BBQ by Swaantje and her friends. We enjoyed the wine, and watched a home made hot air balloon.
Final placing for the day was both pilots sharing equal 12th, but given the slow final leg with the day dying, its likely their placing would not have been significantly different if they had not attracted the penalty.