Sunday 29 May: Report by Mark Hayman
We’ve just got back from a very acceptable meal and piss-up at the local campsite, so please excuse the schpelling and gramere (sic)!
Today was the first day of hostilities with a decent task and reasonable weather. I won’t bore you with the ins and outs of the task (Craig can do that) so I’ll write about the wings…
I’ve been trying a tuned-up serial wing for this comp and I got to fly it today for the first time, so I suppose I’ll write about what it’s like compared to my old two-line comp wing.
Firstly, it is quite a lot slower. It’s about the same at trim but pushing half-bar results in about 52km/h instead of around 60km/h.
Secondly, it collapses a lot more and is much ‘looser’ than the two-liner in the air, so it moves about a lot more and is not nearly so solid in the sky.
Thirdly, the leading edge is more fragile and bends under a lot in turbulence when the two-liner would cut through it and keep flying.
Fourthly, it is quite mobile and ‘talky’ with the pilot where the two-liner was much more of a board.
Now normally when people talk about gliders they say ‘it is very stable’ when referring to how reassuring the glider feels in rough air, and normally people equate this with resistance to collapsing. So from what I’ve written above the new glider it should be much less ‘stable’ than the old comp wing, and therefore not as nice to fly but curiously this is not the case, at least for me.
I felt like although it moved a lot (and bear in mind I’ve not flown a serial wing since 2006) it felt hugely safer than my last comp wing. It felt like a big collapse would be just a passing waft of fabric with very little energy involved wheras my old comp wing felt like if it collapsed you were going to be in a whole heap of trouble and if it was a big one you’d have the thing flying underneath you if you were not careful. So it ‘feels’ less stable but at the same time a lot safer. I’m glad about this as I was worried it would feel both less stable AND less safe. As it is I’m going to have to get used to taking a lot more small collapses again but be, perhaps, less worried about the ‘Big One’ that everybody gets every few hundred hours of flying. Luckily this is exactly what I wanted so I’m reasonably happy.
So how did it go? Well, you’re not going to win a task on it… Surprisingly gliding with R10’s etc. at trim there’s not a lot of difference but as soon as you put some speed on you’re not going to do anything against them. Unfortunately I’ve promised my long-suffering missus, Kat, that I’m not going to take any risks anymore as I have two small kids to think about and halfway round there was a glide onto a leeside ridge which I couldn’t be arsed to battle through, so I went and had a pint in the bar instead. This means I can’t tell you how it would have performed on the task as, by the time the boys came to goal on their hotships, I had already landed and was supping a nice cold pint…
I get the feeling I’m not as motivated to do this as I once was! 🙂
Cheers, Mark
Follow the action from the 2011 British Paragliding Open in Slovenia
Mark Hayman and Craig Morgan
Follow their daily XCmag.com blogs here
Paragliding Comps UK
Full results, live tracking and task reports are here
Slovenian Paragliding Open
The competition website is at www.slovenia-pgopen.com
