Aero Events is bringing the 2002 Masters of Freestyle Hang Gliding Contest to San Diego's Mission Bay during the 36nd annual Bayfair event September 20th -22nd. The event is expected to draw 200,000 spectators to make Bayfair, San Diego‚s largest annual sports competition and family event. Mission Bay Park encompass‚ more than 4600 sun splashed acres and is the world‚s largest man made aquatics park.
The park offers a myriad of boating and water related recreational areas, bike paths, miles of sparkling white sand beaches, and Sea World of California. Never before have so many spectators witnessed a Freestyle Hang Gliding contest. As in all four past Masters Contests, Aerotowing will be used to increase the fairness and validity of the competition.
The gliders will be towed up from Fiesta Island located in the center of Mission Bay. The pilots will begin their Freestyle routines at 2000‚ above the center of the bay between Fiesta Island and East Vacation Island. RC Dave Freund will once again accept duties as the Masters contest principal Judge. Two Great Contests in one event! And oh yeah, The Masters of Freestyle Contest will be held along with the World Series of Power Boat Racing. You want powerboat racing? They‚ve got Unlimited Hydroplanes, Drag Boats, Formula One, Offshore Racers and more!
The appeal of the whole event is multiplied with both of these extreme sports appearing together. The event announcers will call the audience‚s attention alternately to the water, then to the sky during the three days of the event. First the Power Boats will roar loudly down the racecourse and pour into the turns trailing tall rooster tails of spray. Then the gliders will silently dive and climb as they perform loops, rollovers and spins with bright tails of colored smoke tracing their paths across the sky!
Judging a Freestyle Hang Gliding Contest
by RC Dave Freund - Masters Contest Principal Judge
Only highly qualified pilots that are very experienced at performing Freestyle maneuvers are permitted to compete in a Freestyle Contest. A panel of 5 well-trained pilots, judges a Freestyle Hang Gliding Contest. Their task is to identify the maneuvers each pilot performs ("What was that?"); Decide how well they performed it (Was it a good one?), and was the whole routine smooth and linked together artistically?
Each maneuver has a starting direction of flight and climbs to the top of the arc where the judges must determine, to within 10 degrees, the angle that the glider attains. This gives a score for difficulty of each maneuver flown. A perfect loop is fairly easy to spot as the glider stays in a straight line all the way through a "back flip". The beautiful "Rolling" maneuvers are more difficult to judge as the glider twists and changes direction at the same time. Again the angle at the top is noted and so is the change in direction from wings level at the start, to level - but upside down at the top. This takes practice to judge well.
Finally, the judges must count the number of 360-degree rotations when the pilot spins the glider. The difficult part here is to determine when the glider actually begins to spin. Usually a glider takes 1/2 a turn before it drops into a spin... but not always! To score a spin the glider must complete at least 180 degrees of rotation. The lists of numbers are averaged and added up, and then the high and low judge's scores are dropped to give a final score for each pilot competing. To be valid, a contest must have at least 4 rounds flown by each pilot.
