Haze.

90 Degrees. Haze. Humid. This is not the trifecta of awesome one would want when working out this whole acro thing. Which way is up? I have no idea.

Okay it wasn’t THAT bad. To be honest it was a fantastic learning experience. It was a challenge to find the right line and really lock into a pitch attitude (45 degrees nose up straight up, straight down that type o’ thing.) I started stringing the sequence together straight away including positioning in the “box” Competition acro is flown inside a 3000 foot box. Stay inside the box. Do not go outside the box. If you go outside the box you will be incinerated by lasers. Or, get a few points deducted from your score if the lasers miss.

So, where do you place the first figure? How far down the box do you fly? These all change according to what the wind is doing. Flying into the wind slows down your relative speed over the ground. So, consider I’m cruising along at 140mph. With no wind I would be doing 140mph over the ground (yes, I’m leaving out true airspeed considerations for the pilots out there.) With 100 mph of wind coming straight at me, I would only be doing 40mph over the ground. It would take a substantially longer amount of time to fly through the box into the wind. Conversely, if I had 100mph pushing me I would rocket out of the box before I even knew what happened.

That is just flying straight and level. Now consider flying a loop. Flying into the wind all that force is pushing against the airplane. As you go up over the top of the loop now the wind is pushing you along! Now keep the loop going more and…you get the picture. Anyone can do a loop or a hammerhead. It’s the dude (or dudette) that can play the wind that is going to get the better scores.

That was yesterday. Round 2 and 3 coming up…now.