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Well, what a fortnight it was!  I attended a Prize Shoot, and won, attended Jerilderie LSF flying event, and came near last, and was witness to the Canley Vale plane crash a few days ago.

North Rocks Prize Shoot (Benchrest)

I’ve not mentioned on Becsta.COM yet that I’m a sports shooter, but the past fortnight has been so exciting in my world of sports shooting that I’m bursting to tell you all!

I started target shooting back in October last year, and initially began this sport shooting a discipline called Rimfire Benchrest. We use (mostly) customised .22LR rimfire rifles, and shoot off the bench using a scope at a target 50m away.  In late November last year, I bought a beautiful custom Feinwerkbau rifle with a Lilja barrel and specialist benchrest stock.

In April 2010, I attended the TRA Nationals, and shot a 598 (out of 600), with 46 centres, to place 5th overall in Benchrest.  A guy from Queensland scored 599 (also 46 centres) to come 1st and be crowned the National Champion.

In May 2010, I attended the Springwood Prize Shoot, and shot a 597 with 44 centres, to place 2nd overall in A Grade.  The winner shot a  598 w/ 50 centres.

A few weeks ago, I attended the North Rocks Prize Shoot, and did rather well!  I shot a 599, with 53 centres, to win A Grade. Second was 598 w/ 46 centres, and third was 595 w/ 40 centres.

What was remarkable about this victory was that I managed to pick the wind, and shoot to the conditions, whereas a lot of people shot poorly because the wind was flukey, messy, and sometimes downright despicable.  It wasn’t, however, blowey, so timing and reading the conditions were paramount.  A truly sweet victory indeed.

North Rocks Prize Shoot (Prone)

In late Feb, I started shooting prone smallbore target rifle, which is a discipline shot at the Olympics.  This form of shooting uses a .22LR target rifle, with peep sights, a shooting jacket, sling, glove, and is shot from the prone position.  The distance to the target is the same, at 50m, but we shoot 5 shots into each target on a card, to score 200 for a card.

The day after I’d competed in the Benchrest comp, I competed in the prone discipline.  I knew I’d do ok, as I’d been previously shooting excellent scores in our club competition, but as a B Grader, I didn’t have any grandiose visions of winning the competition outright, as there were several very experienced A Graders shooting on the day too.

Anyway,  I set up on the firing line, to find that the wind had picked up a notch, was very shifty, and the wind flags were pointing in every direction, and often all at once too. Because I’m still noobish at this discipline, I was full of fear before that first shot, as I knew that the comp was gonna be a long one – I’d not shot in those conditions before, with the wind so strong, shifty, and really unpredictable. All I know is how to shoot with the sights dead centre on the target, as I’ve not learnt yet how to hold off for wind and spin drift effects.  With a scope, it’s easy, but with peep sights and and eyeball, it’s a completely different ballgame – err shot.

I really shouldn’t have worried, and I found that I soon forgot about the cruel wind, and used all my reserves of patience and concentration to shoot what I thought was an average score for the competition – a 580 (193 + 196 + 191) – far less than what I’ve been shooting in the club comp (about 196′s or higher each card). In the back of my mind, I knew that, no matter how good I’d shot, someone would have shot better. What I think was telling about my day was that I was last off the firing line each time, and often I had 5 or more shots to do whilst everyone else waited for me to finish. That was patience at work, acutely watching the flags.

You see, I quickly realised that there were periods of time when the breeze either blew from R to L and all the flags were in the same direction, or there were lulls of a few minutes.  There were times when the flags were parallel to the ground and pointing all around the compass (literally!), and I’d hear shot after shot go off. Unless they’re being shot at the sighter targets, they’re wasted shots, and costly too.

Well, as it turned out, noone shot better than me, not even the A Graders.  I’d won the prone comp outright by one point. The guy who won A Grade, but was second outright, shot a 579.

An Opportunity Awaits Thee Who Shoots Well

This story doesn’t end with my two victories that weekend.

The gunsmith who built my benchrest rifle queried me after I’d won the benchrest comp whether I was going to shoot in the RBA competition.  I’d not thought about seriously competing in RBA, as I’ve generally not had the time to compete at anything other than my club and random other weekends.  When I looked at my calendar, Malabar RBA shoot was free, so I decided to attend, to see what RBA shooting would be like, and also to see whether I’m any good at it.

A few days later, I received a call from one of the most powerful men in rimfire benchrest shooting in this country.  He also attended and competed at the North Rocks Prize Shoot, but didn’t do as well as he expected. He was enquiring whether I was interested in attending the RBA Nationals, being held in Brisbane in August.  The sweetener was that if I did well, I may very well be considered for selection to represent Australia at the Rimfire Benchrest World Championships in 2011.

Well, didn’t I sit up and take notice then!

Flying at Jerilderie 2010

I attended the Jerilderie 2010 LSF tournament, held again this past June long weekend, and am thoroughly fed up with it.

Jerilderie in June is cold, often blowey up high, is very hard on the models, we get up at an insane hour of the morning to be ready to fly by 8am, am often packing up in the dark, is so cold your hands freeze up (did I mention this place is cold!?), the competition itself is hard, demanding, I complain about the short length of the winch line (measured at 143m) and get ignored by the tournament organisers and LSF committee yet have someone in second or third place complain the next day and it’s “oh, thats not right, we need to fix that… they should have complained yesterday about the short lines… it’s their fault” and it gets fixed, and the tournament is just plain hard work.  The nights we get drunk, stuff ourselves full of yummy food, eat drink and be merry.

What is there not to like about Jerilderie LSF tournaments?

Well, the political side of the competition truly bites, and I was introduced to that for the first time this year.

You see, they changed the length of the winch line for this year’s competition from 200m to 150m.  At the AGM, a motion was passed by the majority present that the winch lines would remain at 150m for next year.  I’ve not seen the point of 150m lines, bar turning the competition from a landing comp, to a flying comp in a vain attempt to “spread the field” a bit in the scoring. So what if the score from 1st to 20th place is 100 points! That’s why we have computers with programs to track and determine the end results according to set criteria and rules.

I stood up at the AGM and said matter of factly that I wasn’t having fun.  Well, even though the flying did get better the next day, I still wasn’t having fun, and that’s a shame.  With the wind blowing strongly on the first day, and everyone needing to achieve stonking launches to minimise the height lost by the reduction in winch line length, there was carnage galore, with broken winch lines, and out of control planes.  I’ve never seen as much carnage to models that day at that competition ever.  Some of the guys unconsciously pushed the limits too far, and that’s wrong, and quite dangerous.

With my new replacement eXplorer, I didn’t want to push the bounds of what’s possible with that plane, and suffered as a consequence. I never recovered from the bad flights I had, and as a result, ended up down in 50-something place, out of about 62 pilots(?).  In comparison, last year, with 200m lines, I came up around the early 20′s.

It’s just too hard a competition to have fun at, unlike Armidale.

And I was thinking about that thought since returning home from Jerilderie.  It seems that Armidale is more laid back, and I attribute that to the varied flying we have up there. Armidale is more informal, you can fly Open Class (F3J/F3B planes), RES Class, Open Electric, Limited Electric, and hand launch. Jerilderie is very formal, geared for the expert flyers and aspirants for Worlds selection, and we only fly Open Class and hand launch.

I found out at the AGM that LSF Australia donates money to the F3J Worlds Team, the F3B Worlds Team, and now potentially also the F3K (Hand Launch) Worlds Team. Yet, the LSF as an organisation is not there to support anything bar promoting flying and flight proficiency. There’s no promotion of the sport of flying (and gliding in particular) as a whole, there’s no support for juniors or beginners/intermediates, there’s no promotion of the sport for women, and if you don’t have an expensive F3J or F3B plane, you’re not gonna do well in the tournament.  It’s as simple as that.

Jerilderie does appeal to me, however, as it’s a great excuse to get away for a long weekend, reaquaint with flying buddies, and simply fly. I always enjoy that part a lot.

… and a Sad Ending to the Fortnight.

At 8am on Tuesday, the day after returning from Jerilderie, I was standing on the platform at Rooty Hill, waiting for my train to arrive, when I noticed a plane flying quite low and slow.  It was tracking southbound directly over Rooty Hill Road (North) and Rooty Hill Road (South), roughly parallel with the M7 Motorway.  My initial thought at the time was that it was a geospatial mapping aircraft.  It was flying at a height of about 500-600ft, and was just above the dispersing fog. I’ve commuted from Rooty Hill for some 5 years now, so I found it was so out of character to see a plane in that part of the sky, that I was bound to take an interest in it.

As it was flying away from me, I looked up at it again, and noticed what I thought was a prop blade hanging down below the right engine pod.  My next instantaneous and unconscious thought was “why wasn’t it windmilling?”.  I did not connect the dots and conclude that the plane was in trouble.  I looked away, then looked back at it, but it’d flown far enough away that I couldn’t pick out any details.

I did connect the dots later when I was at a coffee break, noticed on the caffeteria TV that a plane had crashed in Canley Vale, wandered into work, and discovered that the plane I witnessed fly low and slow over Rooty Hill was the one that crashed next to Canley Vale Public School a few minutes later.

I noticed the following about the plane:

• It was flying “clean”, i.e. no flaps
• It was flying in a straight line, no weaving or bobbing around
• It was flying low and slow.  With my model gliding experience, it was about 2 to 3 times tree height, about 500-600ft.  If I was flying a model at that point in time in that airspace, I’d have been seriously worried about that aircraft being in the same space.  Note that I don’t fly gliders at Rooty Hill, obviously.
• The engine note I would say was equivalent to a very fast WRX boxer engine burble, not the crisp, clean turbo-prop note.  It was NOT surging at that time.
• I thought I’d noticed a prop blade hanging at approx 7:30-o-clock position down from the RIGHT hand engine pod, looking from the back of the plane.  I did not see any other blades (it has three blades), though I could be mistaken in “seeing” this blade.
• No undercarriage were down
• The weather was mild, though cold, and foggy.  Blue skies above the fog.
• The fog was light enough for me to see from Rooty Hill platform 1 down the tracks and under the M7 Motorway overpass, but not all the way up to Doonside train station.  It was slowly dissipating away.
• The fog bank was fairly low.
• I didn’t see the occupants.
• The plane was not trailing any smoke
• There were no other interesting marks or anything out of place on the fuselage that I could see
• I didn’t see the initial outbound journey, or the time of the initial incident, or the turn to head southbound. I only noticed it as it approached Rooty Hill shops and the train station, and watched it for about 10 to 15 seconds as it flew overhead.

The next day, I contacted the ATSB, and reported the above observations to the investigators.  It’s the first time I’ve ever had to do anything like that, and I hope it’s gonna be the last time. I found the audio transcript on the LiveATC.Net website, and listened to it.  Towards the end, you can just feel the fear in the pilot’s voice, but even then, he was still matter-of-fact, and in control of himself, and trying desperately to get back to Bankstown.

I hope that what little info I could provide the investigators, it would help them to solve the mystery of why the aviation community lost two good people that day.

So that ends a rather interesting fortnight.

June 17th, 2010 | Tags: Benchrest, Jerilderie, Prize Shoot, Prone TR, RBA | Category: Competitions, General News, Gliding Events, Shooting | Subscribe to comments | You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed