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The Ferry Challenge Feedback Thread

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EHM-2387 Eric-Jan:
This thread is for the feedback you might want to give Management, regarding the recent Ferry Challenge Event.

I'll start off myself:

Pros:

* Something Different
* GA plane (a personal preference)
* Requires more planning in order to do things right, realistically, AND fuel efficient - planning for, and with, weather i more important
* route is not set
Cons:

* route is not set. Is also a con, because everybody flies, or at least can fly, a different route at different times. This makes it more of a solo event. Not much room for flying together online. Or at least: that requires more coordination than practical, so in practice, everybody is on their own on this.
* The fuel economy prize is easily tampered with (fly on with zero fuel; mid-air refuelling)
* flights cannot be followed as easily on the website. The flight dissappears from the recent flights list as soon as landed on an intermediate stop
* The total number of flights is reduced, because these 8 to 20 legs count as one flight (admin thing; it looks as if flight activity has dropped, but in reality it is more positive than reported
* Any error in FL record keeping is only discovered after having flown 45 hours
Plese feel free to share you thoughts, so that we may improve!  :D

EHM-2758 Peter:
First of all congratulations to the three of you, who made this trip so fuel-efficiently. Next time I'll try a solar driven engine to win this challenge  ;), provided of course that I learn to master the use of Flight Logger.

I totally agree with the remarks Eric-Jan made. Though it seemed almost impossible to fly this one together online, it was great fun. Still I missed the online chatting during those endless, monotonous legs over just water.

Nevertheless after having flown the Alaskan event together, it was indeed something else. In my opinion I certainly encourage this kind of events  to take place occasionally. For a change.

Meet you all on Mumble for our next event!

Peter

EHM-1829 Trevor:

       A very big thanks to E-J etc for organizing and planning the event. ;)
       Congratulations to everyone that finished, I see some unlucky pilots had problems "saving flights"  ; that
       would have been very frustrating for them, especially after all the planning involved.

       That's a good idea regards Solar power Peter, but favourable winds and the Sun to shine all in the
       one day at EGPC would be asking too much. ;D

       Looking forward to the next one already, hope to see you all on Mumble.
      T

EHM-2758 Peter:
There are many ways to skin a cat, Trevor or as we over here in Holland use the proverb: there are many roads that lead to Rome or should I say ... to Dunn. B.t.w. it was a really nice, sunny day over here today.

Peter ;)

EHM-1152 Thomas:
The event was great fun as a chance to get 'back to basics' with flying and I would also like to give my thanks for its organisation.

I will admit that I was a bit confused by the fuel usage in terms of how much less was used on my flight. I thought how can that be?!  I then read E-J's thoughts on tampering with fuel usage and don't want anyone to think that is what I did (because I might think that if I was one of you looking at the fuel usage results!).  It would be good to understand why there was such a difference. Here are the main points of my flights:

- Used A2A aircraft
- Kept the fuel mixture very low in the cruise (sometimes down to 35%)
- Kept the cruise speed very low
- Always flew very long distance legs (many took around 10 hours)
- Flew to relatively small airfields to keep down the taxi time
- Used much more direct routing once I had crossed the Atlantic, as they are much more open to such flying
- Always considered the weather, particularly wind direction (using ActiveSky)

Is there a difference there with how everyone else was flying? Perhaps it is just the A2A being modelled differently? Or even something to do with how the A2A fuel is added before a flight using their software which maybe isn't picked up in the same way by FL?

Or maybe someone else can suggest a reason?

But I certainly look forward to the next event!

Thomas

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