1-26 Championship Practice Day 1

Hello race fans,

Sunflower is back again for another big contest. This year about 25 1-26's will duke it out for the title of Champion. 5 or 6 "Low Performance" (That's the glider not the pilot) entries will compete in parallel.

This year the Low Performance class will fly under 1-26 Rules and use the same tasks, with SSA Handicap applied.

JimBob Slocum arrived last week and Dan Nezgoda and Jim Neff were flying with him at Sunflower over the weekend. We had some good days although it was pretty hot with surface highs over 100F. Luckily the lift was decent with several days in the 8000 ft range, and Sunday was pushing 10K MSL. Not bad for Flat Lands!

Yesterday, Monday, we had a cold front pass through in the morning and the sky filled with cumulus about 12:30 PM. Jerry Boone made a nice flight in his newly refinished Duster. He went to McPherson and Lyons and back. Jerry's Duster is the "Diamond Duster" that JJ Sinclair built. Read about it in the Soaring archive on the new website!

Today the winds blew hard, about 25 mph all day out of the south. No practice task was set. Ron Schwartz took a high tow to test out his TE system. It must've worked ok since he was up for over an hour. He snatched a few climbs over 6000 MSL but said there was no way he could make progress into the wind. Ron is used to flying in the wind, being from Blairstown, but he is still having trouble finding the ridge here in Kansas.

Tom Pressley is returning to score the contest. I'm the CM/CD. A small army of Kansas Soaring Association members are making sure things run smoothly. We have about a dozen people camping out at the airport and the rest spread between Airbnb's and hotels in Hutchinson. Sunflower has had a few additional improvements since the 2019 Club Class Nationals, with a new hangar and garage being built.

Today the wheat on the side of the runways was cut. Harvest is in full swing here so landing fields abound. 

Wind looks like an issue the next day or two but then things change and cool down for the weekend and into next week. Should be a good time here!

I'll be putting a report up here as often as I can and remember. More regular updates with photos will be on the contest Facebook page. 

https://www.facebook.com/126Champs

The contest website also has all kinds of good information about the site if you're interested. 

http://sunflowersoaring.org/default.aspx?a=126