F3J World Championships
By Barry Kennedy
Team USA soars to a Martin Cup victory and multiple Senior and Junior honors
Congratulations to the US F3J team! Senior members Joe Wurts, Skip Miller, and Tom Kiesling won silver medals at the World Championships for RC Soaring, held July 30–August 6 in Martin, Slovakia. The Junior team of Cody Remington, Casey Adamczyk, and Joseph Newcomb took the gold. Cody also won the individual title, and Casey placed third in the Junior World Cup Championship.
Travel and preparation
As the US team assembled in Vienna, Austria, from across the US, it encountered its first problem: lost luggage. Skip Miller and Joe Wurts were missing airplanes and transmitters. Unable to wait for the misplaced items, the team climbed aboard the chartered bus headed for Martin. The missing equipment trickled in over the next two days. The bus arrived in Martin at approximately 1 a.m. The team members were jetlagged and travel-weary, but they were up early the following day to train for the Martin Cup.
Working with the towers, it became apparent that the thrower was crucial to a huge launch. A typical F3J launch is three seconds or less on the towline. Joe Wurts gave the strongest launches, so he was the designated thrower for most of the Martin Cup and the World Championships. Skip Miller had arranged for the US towline to be delivered early to Jaro Mueller in Slovakia and soaked it in water for a month. The water helps the line become more elastic and less prone to breaking during a maximum-effort launch.
Martin Cup
The Martin Cup preceded the World Championships (July 28–30) and was open to all who wanted to fly. Out of 180 contestants, Joe placed first and Cody finished second. The other nations’ teams became aware that the US had made a strong statement for the upcoming World Championships.
Our Senior and Junior teams had a marked advantage with the best four towers on the field:
- Phil Barnes
- Frankie Burnoski
- Craig Greening
- Chris Keller
These towers consistently gave the team excellent tows. Towlines were also checked repeatedly and "randomly" for illegal line lengths during flyoffs.
World Championships: competition
The World Championships started promptly at 8 a.m., with "I Got You (I Feel Good)" by James Brown blasting over the public-address system. Flying continued until about 7 p.m. to get in the maximum number of rounds, with breaks only for rain showers.
I spoke with Cody Remington during a break about his preparation. He said he had been working with Skip Miller every day for a month prior to the Worlds, so he knew what to expect and felt well prepared.
Cody described his start: his first flight of the Worlds was ruined when he hit himself on landing (an automatic zero), but he put that behind him and then put in good flights consistently.
After 10 rounds of competition, Joe Wurts and all three Juniors were in the flyoffs. There was a shortage of towers to support all four fliers, so Philip Kolb and others from the German team graciously offered to help with towing.
The 15-minute flyoffs were challenging as the weather cooled and intermittent rain showers passed through. Cody described his flyoffs:
"There were four rounds of flyoffs. I had Skip Miller and Craig Greening calling for me, along with Chris Keller and Utz towing. I was very comfortable with the callers and was getting amazing tows. The flights were very hard. There were only very small and weak thermals, in 5–10 mph of wind.
"To make the 15-minute time, I had to find a thermal and stick with it until the airplane was just about out of sight, then make it back to the landing area. The thermal would only give me enough altitude to get back and start my landing pattern, so you could not make any mistakes."
In the flyoffs Cody took first place, Casey placed third, and Joseph finished sixth, giving the American Juniors the team trophy. This was the first time a German team did not win the Junior trophy in F3J.
"This was by far the best year for the USA Junior team, but we are working on building an even stronger team to defend our title," said Casey.
Senior competition climax
The final round produced a dramatic midair collision. Senior pilots David Hobby and Massimo Verardi collided with roughly two minutes to go. David's glider suffered a severe gash in the right wingtip and spun a couple of revolutions before recovering to make a 100-point landing, albeit 50 seconds early. The time and landing were still good enough, and he became the first repeat World Champion.
Looking ahead
The next F3J World Championships will be hosted by the Istanbul Model Glider Club in Istanbul, Turkey, August 1–10, 2008. For more information visit:
Barry Kennedy [email protected]
Transcribed from original scans by AI. Minor OCR errors may remain.
