Pribina Sailplane Grand Prix 2008
Sailplane Grand Prix Quallification
September 7-13 2008 NITRA, SLOVAKIA

Competition - 7th Sep 2008

2008-09-07 22:31:29

The day started with nice clear sky and quite high temperature for this time of this season. Before the briefing at 10:00 several glider have been already on the grid for runway 33. Gliders were positioned in 5 rows, each row except the last one consisted of 4 ships. The weather according to forecast looked promissing so the task was similar lenght as yeasterday. Only positioning was no too much to mountains. The northest point abeam Prievidza airport. Unfortunately the temperature was not rising as expected and after sending the sniffer to the air we have realised that the postponement will be neccesarily. It happend twice with half hour and one time 15 minutes. With that regard we had to shorten the task by some 60km. Final take off was done at 13:15. It last 31 minutes to get all 18 heavy gliders to the air with help of two Turbo Cmelaks, one Zliln Trener and one EuroFox Tow. Then after openning of the start at 14:05 all sailplanes went on the task. Big disappointment for all of us and a lot of people on Internet happened subsequently because the Online Tracking was not operational. It was caused by the wrong setting of SIM cards - PIN code requirement did not allow to activate them by the unit itself. Anyway it was impossible to repair because all were in the air. Despite 1/8 CU clouds at that time the flight was not easy. Thermals were in bubbles and tops at 1000m only. This was most probably caused by the fact that temperature had not reached the maximum because of high Cs clouds were developing in the west. The first problem for pilots came in area of the first TP Cigel where few of them landed out or run their engines. Despite the bad conditions others were flying further south along the mountains Tribec to area of Nitra airport. There the weather was the best of today. Thermals up to 1400m and climbs up to 1,8 m/s. Unfortunately further South of Nitra there were another much thiner Cs clouds which had stopped development of thermals. At that point pilots realised the task could not be completed. All, one by one, either outlanded/abandoned the task or run their engines. Finaly the day was not successful and we had not valid competition day, because Grand Prix rules require at least one pilot to finish the task. The pilots knew that development of Cs was hard to predict because it was not indicated on our forecast sources. Nevertheless we will continue tomorrow and the days after.