From Hero to Zero in a single turn

Posted by Pieter

By now you've seen many report on our progres but not had much insider info. So here follows a short report on my woes.

At this level of competition the margin for error is just so smal that a single turn can drop you down from a pottentialy good score to Zero in a single turn.

Take task 3 for instance. Limmited Fuel, 50.8km distance,5 turnpoints, start & finish gates, 14 photos to recognise and mark en route. Map work prepparation for a task like this can easily take up to 1 and a half hours. Fueling procedure another hour, ordered take off sequence add another half hour. Flight time on this was about 1hr 15. In total more than 4 hours. Shortly before the task a new Now fly zone got published, with the edge being about 60meters of from our flight path. Although turnpoints have radiuses of 200 meters allowing for in-accuracies, No fly zones have a zero meter margin for error.

4 Hours of activity. Less than 1 minute veering of track by 50 meters drifted me onto the edge of the no fly Zone. In stead of a 16th place I dropped down to dead last with Zero score.