F3J at ETB on Sunday

ETB CD/Scorers tent

ETB hosted an F3J event with was also served as another Qualifier for the juniors. Ryan Nelson and his dad Simon flew up from Durban to attend this event to give Ryan an opportunity to try and qualify as a reserve for the Junior team.

BERG's team was made up of Piet, Mark, Derek and Evan. Piet did very well flying his trusty old Tsotsi 100 , ending in 4th place overall. Quite and achievement when you consider he was up against some really fancy models like Supra's, X-pro's, Pike Perfects and the like. Mark ended up in 6th place. Derek (12th) had a few hiccup's by overflying the working time, otherwise he would have been a lot higher in the rankings. I unfortunately had equipment failure on my Emoyene, so ended up way down the rankings.

On the whole a very enjoyable day. There were a mixture of hand-tow and winches (150 met to turn-about). From what I saw there is very little difference between the winch or hand-tow launches!

Personally, I like the F3J format of 10 minutes working time to record as much flying time as possible. The all up and all down at the same time is very exciting. Amazing that there are not more misshapes on the launch when all the models are launched at the same time!

All the score and some more photos will be posted to the F3J Blog at this link. http://f3j.blogspot.com/

Some photo's from the day.

Ryan Nelson with Ian Lessen. Ian did a lot of coaching, which helped a lot it seems, with Ryan easily achieving 89% of the top score for the day. On the right the Nelsons' plane box.

BERG's pits. Evan's Emoyene and Mark's Supra's and Xperiance

Piet and Derek

Flight line with the ETB team nearest the camera.

Craig preparing his brand new Xperence

Catching some Zzzzz's

Peter Eagle and Craig in the background.

The Big BERG Blog Birthday Bash Party and Outing To Volksrust

The last Flight of the day over Volksrust. North Slope.

Well the poll has showed us a close battle between a ‘fun fly at the Berg field’ and a ‘Slope Trip to Volksrust’ with only one vote more in favor for the slope trip, and so it will be!!!

September the 8th and 9th has been booked with oom Louis place and judging by the popularity of the last trip over the long weekend ( 9 members of the BERG club alone out of 40 ) this will be something to look forward to. So get your Zagi’s and other slope airies ready. Please let me know either by = email me
or when you see me on the berg field if you are joining us. The accommodation for the sleep over at oom Louis’s place including bed and breakfast won’t cost more than R85 per person.

In the mean time the Blog counter has step on and now it looks like we will get to the 6000 hits mark well before the 9th of September. Last month (July) we recorded the most hits so far in a single month (812) and by the half way mark this month (680 hits so far).

Once again thanks you to all our contributors and viewers for making the Berg Blog a great place on the web to view.

I have added some pictures of our past trips to Volksrust just to get you in the mood to come with us to this really majestic place. Eat you your heart out !!

Mike and 6meter Ventus.

Piet let's Charl's DG1000 lose. North slope

Sunset on south slope.

Charl launching Mike's Stretched wing Zagi.

VENTUS 2CX MAIDEN FLIGHT

As the pilot I unfortunately did not get any photos but recorded the flight on video, which should something had gone wrong would prove useful to study later.



Johan Snyman of Secunda is credited with the following images, thank you.


Charl and Peter preparing to throw, backwards facing caps required.

After the initial throw the glider clears the rocks and is on its way.


See Charl now has his cap on backwards .





In her element soaring on the aircurrents.

SPECIFICATIONS.

This aircraft is scratch built using epoxy/glass with carbon fibre re-inforcing.

The wingspan is 6 mtrs

The airfoil section is a hybrid MH32 root transitioning to SD7037 mid wing and finishing again with MH32 on the tips which have 2 degrees of washout.

The all up flying weight is 9.00kg

The wing area is +- 120 dm sq

The wing joiner is a 19mm carbon rod (made of 75x 60k tows)

The epoxy was supplied by A.M.T. and is all LR 20 and various harderners.

The wings are vacumn bagged blue foam.

The servos are 11kg digitals with metal gears .

Hindges are silicon

and remember GO BIG OR GO HOME.

BERG postal scores for Aug 2007

Sunday 5 Aug. (3 pilots)

An overcast day with a steady but high wind all day long accounted for the low numbers
of participating pilots flying but even so we managed to do reasonably well.

Piet Rheeders 2095 2.5 Meter Tsotsi SD 7037
Evan Shaw 1705 2 Meter Tsotsi SD 7032
Len Tomas 1523 2 Meter Tsotsi SD 7032

Club Score 5323

Sunday 12 Aug ( 6 pilots)

Excellent day for thermal soaring with not a cloud in sight. Good lift condition
and just about the same amount of sink around made for reading the conditions very important .Many a good pilot got this wrong and paid the penalty for this. I.E Lead foot Shaw.

Mark Stockton 2276 3.2 Meter Eish ?
Kurt Stockton 1978 3.2 Meter Eish ?
Piet Rheeders 1971 2.5 Meter Tsotsi SD 7037
Evan Shaw 1571 2 Meter Tsotsi SD 7032
Peter Joffe 1236 Shogololo ?
Tony Roberts 658 2.5 Meter Tsotsi SD 7037

Club Score 6225

VENTUS 2CX

The maiden flight of Ventus ZS-VCX took place on Friday 10th August on the northwest slope

at Volksrust (Tamatieberg). The wind was northwesterly swinging westerly on occassion and blowing at +- 35kmph. The prototype Ventus no 1 flew well but was difficult to land (hard to slow down) and had underpowered servos for the job. Ventus number 2 (ZS-VCX) is a totally improved model in all respects and can be flown with real authority has a huge speed range and snappy turns on the dual full rates, landings are very gentle.



So less than a year after the maiden of no1 at Rosendal and only 12 flights on these big gliders I think that these flights convince me that this has to be some of the most exhilerating and rewarding results of my modelling career so far, I still plan to push the envelope a little futher.

Above is the data captured on Saterdays flight and after reviewing the flight video it all makes sense .

session 8 flight 2

starts at 0 with switch on in the car park the spikes at 3 mins are probably me blowing into the pitot tube with all my might, to see if it was working ,impressive I managed a 230km/h wind with a nasty chest cold, must have been all the performance enhancing drugs I was taking.

Flight starts at 8 mins with the altitude dropping down(purple) and airspeed (grey)starting to rise.

At minute 12 the vario indicated lift and I was well away from the slope and circled up in the thermal, to a height above the slope of 170 mtrs the rapid straight line decent saw the airspeed touch 150km/ph the grey spike as the altitude drops at about minute 13.

At 15 mins the glider dives down below the ridge to -20 mtrs speed at this time is 110km/hr

At minute 23 another strong thermal was indicated and I climbed to the max flight hight of 189mtrs, the decent was a spiral down hence the airspeed stayed below about 120 km/hr.

At minute 25 a series of higher speed low altitude passes were carried out for some close in video footage the speed remains in the 60 to 110 km/hr range and the aircraft is flown down into the valley on a few passes once descending to -32 mtrs.

At minute 33 the glider is climbed up to start the approach for landing at minute 35 after that the readings are of the airpeed while it was on the ground waiting to be retrieved.

The big servos pulled the battery down to 5.11 as a min and had a max voltage of 6.95 the average for the flight was 6.65volts this is indicated by the green line,(the battery pack is 5 cell NIMH 8000 mah) .

Its an awsome experience to fly this plane, but I have no plans to ever winch launch it.

Weekend happening!

See below for some more photos from Volksrust taken by Johan Snyman and used here with his kind permission. A few more photos can be found here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hyper7



Gert's Minimoa looks so graceful as it climbs out after launch.


(Photo by Johan)



A few photos follow from Sunday 12th August. - Postals.


Rodney has given Justice a Gently Lady and Craig is teaching him to fly it. A rare sight seeing Craig with a GL.

Our newest member Peter Malcolm seen getting in some stick time with Evan and Rodney looking on.


Robert, Tony and I went down to Volksrust on Saturday and we had a ball in the strong west wind. This was Tony's first slope outing and he managed to get in quite a bit of stick time with his Zagi and what's even more remarkable is that it came back home in the same excellent condition it left in. Not a scratch! I flew my new DG1000 and was very impressed with it's handling. An excellent kit which files like a dream and is real value for money.
Unfortunately I did not have my camera with me, so hopefully Charl, Mike and Piet will be adding some interesting news and photos from the slope trip. They went down on the Thursday so should have lots of lekker stuff for us!.... Mmmmh!



Evan's DG1000 (Photo by Johan)

Charle with his DG1000 (Photo by Piet)

Gert's Minimoa (Photo by Johan)

Mike and the Ventus (Photo by Piet)

Mike's 6 meter Ventus. (Photos by Johan)

The Ventus flies (Photo bt Piet)

Discus (+/-3 met??) (Photo by Johan)

Flight line from the landing area. Note all the foamies! I count 7. How many do you see? (click on the photo to enlarge) (Photo by Johan)

Rudi and Charl with the Impala (Photo by Piet)

Rudi's Impala. Looks really good in the air! (Photo by Johan)


This Omie had it's wing chopped in half by a foamie, and Johan Snyman the pilot, was able to fly it with just one aileron and bring it around to the back and land it without too much more damage. (Photo by Johan)

In closing, Piet has some very important information to share with us and will be reporting back on the results of the Poll!???

Shongololo # 7 is born

Robert's Shongololo is out of the moulds and looking splendid. This one is different in that the wings are painted with clear coat and the hybrid cloth is visible through it. It came out better than expected with hardly a blemish and is so shiny that you can even see Robert's reflection in it. See photos below. Click on the photo to see the bigger picture!


With the upcoming F3B league starting in October, we hope to see it and some of the previous 6 flying.

The basic concept is to run an "A" and "B" League. The "A" league will be for the hot-shot pilots and the "B" league will be for the guys that have never flown F3B before and have F3B models. All you guys form the building group! The "A" league pilots will be available as helpers to show you the ropes and help with model set-ups etc.

For more details check the F3B Blog http://www.f3b-league.blogspot.com/

Weekends Events

There is a big contingent of people going down to Volksrust this weekend. With tomorrow being a public holiday some are making a long weekend of it. The weather predictions look promising (see Charl's post below) for NW up until Saturday, which is first prize. The NW slope is the nicer slope and much kinder on landing. Piet, Tony, Robert and I will be going down for the day on Saturday. So see you there!

But we will be back on Sunday at BERG and flying the second round of the Postals .
Only three of us managed to put in a scores last Sunday because of the lousy weather, so we are hoping for a good turnout from the rest of you so BERG can once again put in a good showing. The weather looks good for Sunday with light winds predicted. Better for Thermal than Slope.

Volkies forecast

Here is the forecast for all you slope junkies for the long weekend.

Forecast: Thursday, 9 August 2007

Min: 0°C
Max: 17°C
Weather: Fine.
Wind: light north-westerly
Sunrise: 06:37
Sunset: 17:39
Moonrise: 03:49
Moonset: 14:06
Moonphase: Waning

Forecast: Friday, 10 August 2007
Min: 0°C
Max: 18°C
Weather: Fine.
Wind: moderate north-westerly
Sunrise: 06:37
Sunset: 17:39
Moonrise: 04:45
Moonset: 15:10
Moonphase: Waning

Forecast: Saturday, 11 August 2007
Min: 0°C
Max: 20°C
Weather: Fine.
Wind: moderate westerly
Sunrise: 06:36
Sunset: 17:40
Moonrise: 05:35
Moonset: 16:14
Moonphase: Waning

Forecast: Sunday, 12 August 2007
Min: 1°C
Max: 20°C
Weather: Fine.
Wind: light north-westerly but moderate south-easterly in the afternoon.
Sunrise: 06:35
Sunset: 17:40
Moonrise: 06:17
Moonset: 17:17
Moonphase: New Moon

F3K at BERG on Saturday

There was an F3K at BERG on Saturday. The conditions were tricky with a fairly stiff breeze blowing in from the SW, so what thermals there were, moved very quickly across the field.

To see a round by round report and the results go to the F3K blog http://f3k-rsa.blogspot.com/

The pilots that caught and followed thermals had to be careful to have enough height to push back upwind to make it back into the box. There were quite a few who got caught out and landed short. For those of you who are wondering what I'm on about; in F3K rules there is a box demarcated on the field and pilots must launch and land form inside this areas to score points. If you land outside the box you loose that flight score.


In the photos above you see two gliders without stabilisers. The first is Stephan's FSW DLG (Wyrd) and the second is Ian's Blaster. (No he was not trying to copy Steph) The stab broke off. FSW (Forward Swept Wing). We all know about flying wings (Zagi's) and how they work. Well it's the same for FSW. The reason for the boom with the vertical fin is to assist with stability in the Discus launch. It launched very well, but Stephane still has some fine tuning to get it to thermal better. It has 4 servos in the wing. The outboard ones for ailerons and the inboard ones for elevator/flaps. Yes flaps! So it even has crow breaking.