I do a lot of competition flying, and it seems most of my flights are either at comps, preparing for comps, or at the odd coaching week to help teach others. What I don’t do a lot of is ‘free flying’ in the peak season. The last time I got let loose doing that was the 2013/2014 season in a borrowed LS8, and I went and flew a cheeky 1000km before the owner had got to that point themselves. This season I had a similar chance, with two weeks in which to try and tame a JS1C, OG, before the Australian Nationals and the pre-Women’s Worlds event. The weather at Benalla was looking absolutely out of this world for the few days after Christmas, but not with early starts. It smelt like the perfect chance to take a crack at the 100km triangle.
I drove back up to Benalla from a family Christmas in Melbourne late on 26 Dec and got going with the task planning then. For the 100km you can’t be lazy, and must set your own turn points to suit the weather and fit the distance exactly. The distance of my task on the IGC calculator was 100.084km, and that was something only checked properly after the flight! This was also to be only my second flight in the JS1C-18 with water ballast in, having taken a quick launch and local flight to be comfortable with this a few days earlier.
On the day itself I launched at just before 1pm as wispy cumulus were beginning to appear over Benalla, and slowly worked my way north to my remote start near Tocumwal. Out that way there was no concern with airspace, and slightly better weather forecast. I arrived near the start to find a street running off at 45 degrees to my first leg and went to go gain height under that. It was earlier than I thought the optimum window would be, but after a few minutes of flying around on the street I clicked that it would be perfectly aligned with my third leg in around 25 minutes. I ran back down the street for a start, and gave myself plenty of room to line up the start line properly. I ran through the line doing about 125kts and was going to slow up a little after that, but the speed felt good, and the glide was still incredibly flat, with great netto. The aim of my first leg was to keep the nose down, and the speed up. It was an into wind leg, and I had good streeting to follow. I curved a little to the left of track near the end of the leg to continue on the street, then diverted in the last couple of km to the turn point and rounded it with what seemed like an extraordinary lack of height loss since the start.
The second leg was even better, I hit a few good cumulus with some good pull ups to lose only 300ft for the whole 29km. I made a fairly large deviation just before the turn, as I thought I might find my climb there, but no dice and I ran back around the turn with another good pull up and some extra height.
On the third leg I was starting to run out of space to find my climb in. It was only a 28km leg, but with a few good cumulus just upwind of track. I lucked out with 15km to run and found a suitable 8.8kt climb that I took for 2.5 minutes. I could see the average speed ticking down as I stayed, and it briefly dropped down into the 190s. From there I made my final dash for the finish, and ended up finishing over 250m higher than required. My average speed readout after crossing the line showed me at 207kph, which sounded so completely ridiculous that I was trying to work out what I could’ve done wrong!
I floated around for a while before I got ready to make a second attempt. You never know if you’ve missed a turn point or something, and the weather was still there for it, but with high level cloud looming on the western edge of my task. This would be my last opportunity at it. I went around with a higher start height, and similarly looking to find the climb on the final two legs, this time it didn’t work out so well and I got stuck with a slow climb which I didn’t take high enough. I finished task at a slower speed, and a good few meters under the finish height.
After that I went for more of a fly out to the north, and got to within about 50km of Leeton where the Formula 1.0 competition was on. It was getting late by that point but I easily flew the 250km home to be met by my official observer on landing. He reviewed the trace back in the clubhouse, and confirmed that I had actually cracked the 200kph barrier!
In a way it’s a real shame to have beaten the old record. Set in a different age under different rules, Ingo Renner’s 195kph in a Nimbus 3 is one truly amazing flight.
Ailsa McMillan 