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World Championship Report 1997 The 1997 F3A World Championships for Precision Aerobatics were held in Poland August 29th thru September 6th 1997. This provided a unique opportunity for the Canadian Team, consisting of Dave Patrick, Dezso Vaghy, Paul Svec and Team Manager Tony Kreg to visit an eastern European country, and experience the culture and hospitality of an emerging ex-communist society. The Team members took different routes to get to Poland. Dave Patrick arrived in Poland earlier than most flyers and experienced difficulties in finding the hotel, flying site and practice site due to the language barrier. Paul Svec drove into Poland from the Czech Republic receiving a less then warm reception at the Polish Customs. Dezso Vaghy arrived at the Polish Custom's to be greeted with a requirement to leave a $ 2500.00 US deposit before they would release his 2 aircraft from the cargo terminal. The organizing committee provided all competitors with a Polish letter of introduction including a statement from the Polish Prime Minister stating that we were invited to participate in the World Championships and encouraging full cooperation to us, as guests. Not only did custom's want this deposit, (which would be returned when leaving the country) but it was going to take 3 days to process the paper work, causing Dezso to loose practice day and 1st day of prelims. This was unexceptable, finally after 9 hrs and $ 2500.00 later, we left the cargo terminal with his aircraft. Needless to say our optimism and enthusiasm had been shaken. In addition to all of this, the fuel that Coolpower shipped for the team was slapped with an additional $ 40.00 import duty, which we had to pay. (Many thanks to Tony Stillman of the US team for getting the fuel, and dealing with Polish Customs). This was an agonizing and terrible experience, the organizing committee did absolutely nothing to help us solve these bureaucratic problems. The hotel was located 20 KM from the flying site on the military base in Deblin, 100 Km south of Warsaw. Hotel rooms were very small but clean with private bathroom. We were served traditional Polish food, which was very different to what we were accustomed to. We were pleased with our hotel decision as compared to the alternative of staying in the military hotel on the base. Reports indicated the facilities at the base were small with shared bathrooms and poor food. Poland is not a country that is geared towards tourism. During the practice flights at the local airport we became aware of a potential frequency interference problem. That evening at the managers meeting we were informed that 72 MHz band was used for commercial FM broadcast radio stations. At frequency 72.000 MHz, we found a broadcast station which raised the concern of interference for some of our flyers that were flying on 72.010 MHz, but thanks to the high quality of our Futaba receivers we did not experience any radio problems. Rumors before the contest suggested to fly in and slow, watching the world Champion Naruke fly large and smooth at the 150 meter mark set the tone for judges. He scored extremely well, any pilot flying in and slow were down graded by the judges. A lot of discontent from the pilots about the judge's performance was very evident. The number of judges per flight line was reduced from 5 to 3 judges in a move to reduce cost. This was a major error in judgement by CIAM of FAI. This placed an emphasis on each judge's score. The impact of poor judging and country bias was evident in the results because the high and low score was not dropped. Errors in scoring were seen when the Canadian team member Paul Svec was given a score in round three that was invalid. Bringing this matter to the attention of Mr. Ron Chidgey, the Jury President, he confessed that this was not the first error and did not expect it to be the last. The judging results were the worst he has experienced, Scoring by the Polish organizing committee had errors in it. The final results that were published have mistakes in it that I know of, I can only conclude there are other errors that we may not be aware of. As the representative for Canada at the F3A Technical Sub Committee meeting, the topic under discussion was the future coarse for F3A. The present configuration will be allowed to continue with 'D' schedule as prelim and 'E' as the finals for 1998 and 1999. Recommendations are to increase the difficulty of the finals. The proposal was to have 2 flights of a new more difficult known schedule and 1 flight of unknown schedule which would be made up of 15 maneuvers, one submitted by each finalist to be chosen from a published list of 100 maneuvers. These changes are proposed to happen in the year 2000. To improve the judging results, we will go back to 5 judges per line and implement a TBL computer program with is presently used by full size aerobatic flyers. This program manipulates all of the judge's total scores of each pilot and through as series of computations changes the scores to remove any errors in judgment and country bias. A new computerized pattern scoring system called PASS has been developed which does incorporate the TBL. The PASS program is readily available directly from the creator in California. The finals comprised the top 15 pilots of the prelims. This was a new change proposed by the Polish organizing committee, originally the top 20% of 97 contestants (the top 20 fliers) would go to finals. Canada's team member Dave Patrick placed 20th in the prelims and did not quality for the finals, due to the rule change. In their 1st World Championship appearance, Paul Svec placed 28th and Dezso Vaghy placed 49th. Both flyers showed an impressive improvement in their flying abilities since the team trials. It was nice to see that all of our team members placed within the top 50 F3A flyers in the world. The final results placed Naruke of Japan 1st, Christophe Payant Le Roux 2nd and Wolfgang Matt 3rd. In the finals, it came down to the last flight in which Christophe had 1 – 1000's and Naruke had 2 – 1000's. Christophe needed a flawless flight and finished with a 986 and Naruke of Japan won the last flight with the top score of 1000. The final team results were, Japan 1st, Germany 2nd and Liechtenstein 3rd. Team Canada posted 9th in the World Team standings and should be very proud of efforts. The whole week of events was brought to a close with the closing ceremonies held in an outdoor arena with an Olympic style medal presentation to the winning flyers and teams. This was followed by a lavish banquet with traditional Polish entertainment. As the Team manager, I would like to thank all the team members who put forth their best efforts in both practice and at competition. Team Canada would like to thank all the Clubs in Canada who donated money to help support the team's effort. We would like to offer a special thanks to Futaba America Corporation for their financial support, to Morgan Fuels (Cool Power) for supplying the fuel and PTX Products their donations. I would like to offer a special thanks to MAAC for all of their support. Without help from MAAC and similar organizations, world class competitions would not happen. The modeling community as a whole benefits from the technology and skill levels developed by these events. Technical Report 1997 This year's World Championship brought changes in engines and the fuse shapes. The most popular engines at this year's competition were YS 120, YS 140 with a few prototype YS 160 4-stroke engines. OS 140 2 stroke made an impressive appearance as well as some lesser-known engines such as Bully 145 2 stroke the Czech 120 2 stroke. All three of the Canadian team members were using the YS 120 engines, and found the engines to be reliable and performed well. The YS 140 and 160 4 stroke engines were impressive. They both provided more power than required, therefore allowing the engines to be run at a lower rpm reducing noise. The OS 140 2 stroke was powerful and quite, however modifications to the out of box engine must be done to the carboration in order to achieve satisfactory low and mid range response. Large 2 bladed propellers and smaller 3 bladed propellers combined with low nitro were the key to quiet running engines of this capacity. The overall size of the 2-meter aircraft did not change. Some aircraft are taking the silhouette and fuse shape of Extra and Cap21's. The noticeable changes in the fuselage shape were that they are both large and round with big air scoops. These changes in the shape of the fuselage did not have an obvious effect on the overall flight performance nor did it have an impact on scoring from the judges. Tony Kreg Team F3A Team Manager

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