FAI Free Flight World Cup 2003

2003 marked the introduction of two junior classes into the World Cup, for F1A and F1E. The expansion to cover these new events was accompanied by the largest number of competitions yet in the World Cup for F1A/B/C. The junior events were keenly contested, Istvan Szentpeteri of Hungary finishing just ahead of Matthew Cuthbert of Great Britain in F1A-Junior. Both flyers won the junior category at three competitions each, with Istvan winning by the margin of 2 bonus points. The junior competition results were established as a of the results in the full competition in the class. Istvan's results gave him 19th place in the F1A World Cup.

In the F1E-Junior the victor was Julia Maria Petcu, having placed top in four junior classifications and beating fellow Romanian Adrian Draghici by 2 bonus points over his three wins. Julia, who placed 15th in the overall F1E World Cup, is the daughter of Dan Petcu who won the F1E World Cup in 2001 and 2002.

In the regular classes, Per Findahl won F1A by the narrowest of margins. Per, the World Champion in 2001, had won two competitions and placed seconda in another - exactly the same best results as those of Jari Valo of Finland. Both had the same bonus points and so the winner was determined by counting the fourth best competition result, in which Per's third place was better than Jari's 14th. Russian flyer Yuriy Titov was only three points behind with good bonus points from placing second in the largest event of the year, the Voros Jeno contest held in Hungayr just after the World Championships.

F1B was won by Bernd Silz of Germany ahead of Anatoly Zastavenko (Ukraine) and Alexander Andriukov (USA). These three flyers, and also Ivan Kolic in fourth place, had three wins and the positions were decided by bonus points. The F1C winner was Artem Babenko of Ukraine ahead of British flyer John Cuthbert, who had also been second last year after winning the World Cup in 2001. Artem won three events and beat John on bonus points.

The F1E top four places were taken by Romania, with Marian Popescu winning and Daniel Petcu in second place. Marian had placed second in the World Cup last year and Daniel continues a sequence of high places: during the previous four years he had won the F1E World Cup three times and placed second in the other year.

ORGANISATION

One problem arose with the implementation of the F1E-Junior category. In the competitions during May not all organisers followed the regular approach (as used consistently in F1A) of including all juniors in the results of the major event and producing an additional results list for juniors only. The other organisers treated the junior competition as entirely independent of the main event, which has the particular disadvantage of not allowing the juniors to measure their performance against the senior flyers and possibly restricting them to a very small competition if there are not many junior entries. In F1A there is no difficulty combining results but in F1E scores are expressed as a percentage of the highest time flown in the round and consequently the percentage obtained for a given time may differ between the junior and open events. Following the issue of guidelines, the later events in the year were scored consistently with the juniors included in both open and junior-only competitions and scores calculated appropriately to each event.

There were some cases of concern for competitions not applying high standards of organisation or in following the Sporting Code. One such discrepancy was that Nordic Cup, Canada Cup, Stonehenge Cup, Euro-Fly did not follow the rule for counting extended maximum time.

The results of almost all events were supplied promptly, indeed the results of the 35th Memorial Djordja Zigica was the first competition to provide results on the evening of the event (and these were then included on the World Cup results web site that same evening). A few glitches arose with the extended processing software, for which I apologise, which resulted in a few names temporarily given twice in the results. These have been fixed and final results double checked.

Note about the inclusion of juniors in these statistics: The individual events F1A, F1A-Junior, etc show the numbers relevant to that event. The column headed ALL and the total number of competitors are not totals of all events but are reduced to take account of any occurrences of a junior in the results of the main event.

Number of competitors per country, only those scoring points in 2 or more events:

Total number of participants in all classes: 3129

[FAI Home Page] - [Aeromodelling Commission] - [FF World Cup rules 2003] - [FF World Cup results index]

This page produced by Ian Kaynes