EAA SUN ‘N FUN ADVENTURE RALLY
This year’s EAA Sun n Fun flying event has been the first adventure rally organised since 2019 after COVID-19 hampered many of our flying activities. This was the sixth Sun ‘n Fun adventure rally, following the successful formula established back in 2015.
We had 12 entries, with ten that eventually took part which is a good field given the busy day at Brits with many arrivals and departures attending EAA’s Sun ‘n Fun. This rally is about teams enjoying the more relaxed and fun kind of event mostly involving observation out of the window recognition of ground features and learning about the area being over flown.
For this year, the theme was ‘a bit of everything’ that the North West could offer, bushveld, rivers and mountains in terms of scenery with some accurate flying thrown in. The format was in the form of a pre-defined route map that was available prior to the event starting for everybody to either plan their route with traditional map plotting tools or to program their GPS’s, if they were more at home following the magenta line.
For this year, as was done in 2019, navigation accuracy was also a criteria in the scoring, where a one nautical mile wide virtual corridor was established, where the teams had to make sure that they did not stray outside these boundaries as time penalties would be applied for the period outside the corridor. The format was made a little easier and somewhat shorter, just under 60 nm, with all turn point photos shown as correct and four photographs provided along the last leg, which was a follow the river leg where the location of the photographs had to be marked on the map.
After the briefing, the first competitors took to the skies at 09h30, with the last off at 11h20. The weather was windy and brewing hot, with plenty turbulence over the route, but otherwise an excellent clear day for flying. All teams found their way around and in general the scoring was good. However, some tracks indicated loss of positional awareness.
A booklet was also provided with details of each turn point, whilst a number of questions to be answered, some answers could be obtained from a section of Wiki notes, with a warning, “do not read at your peril….” and guess what…., some forgot to find the answers in the most obvious place or were too busy trying to keep on track, some answers had to be found on the map, whilst some answers had to be answered by looking out the window.
With the teams safety home, it was time for marking the exam papers which was left to Martin Meyer to carry out, whilst I downloaded the loggers and scored the navigation accuracy. On returning, the competitors had to carry out a spot landing where landing line judge Dave Lister and Kevin Marsden were on hand to adjudicate, also trying out some new video recording equipment.
First place in landing went to Fanie Scholtz in his Sling ZU-FZF, second place went to Sean Cronin in his BatHawk ZU-IGI and in third place Neil Bowden in his Sling ZU-OSH.
When all was tallied up, Pierre Dippenaar took home the trophy, this being the second time since 2015 flying the Piper Cub ZS-PCX on his own, something to be said to fly slow enough not to miss the navigation points. In second place was Fanie Scholtz with his sister Carla Haasbroek flying their Sling ZU-FZF and in third place was Sean Cronin and Marie Reddy in the BatHawk ZU-IGI, Marie having achieved full marks on all the questions.
The Sling floating trophy was handed over to Pierre Dippenaar, this being the sixth event where this floating trophy has been awarded, the Sling factory continues to support the Sun ‘n Fun event and also the Adventure Rally.
Many thanks are extended to Roel Jansen and the Brits Flying Club for organising space for the briefing, Martin Meyer and Iaan Myburgh for assisting in marking the answer books, DJA Aviation, Pilots Post, Wings ‘n Things, Atlas Shell for goody bags for the competitors.