FAI Free Flight World Cup 2005

During the previous year, 2004, the Free Flight World Cup had the greatest number of competitions ever. This year there was one fewer event in F1A/B/C but 3 additional events for F1E. The total number of participants in all these events reached a new high of 3679.

F1A, F1A Junior and F1B were all closely fought with the winner in doubt until the last competition, the Euro Fly in Switzerland in early November. F1A was won by the defending holder, Per Findahl of Sweden – his third consecutive year with the F1A World Cup title. F1A Junior was won by Matthew Cuthbert (GBR) who had won four competitions, ahead of Max Herwig with three wins but two less bonus points. Max had also been a member of the German team which won the 2005 Junior European Championships in F1A.

The leader of F1B for much of the year had been F1B had been Bernd Silz of Germany who had accumulated 6 wins in his results. However, he was beaten into second place by Alex Andrjukov (USA) who won at Euro Fly. Together with an earlier victory in Argentina and then at the Sierra Cup in October, these three wins of large events gave Alex the lead by 3 bonus points.

F1C was closely matched in results by Artem Babenko (UKR) and John Cuthbert (GBR) who had both accumulated 4 wins and a second place, but Babenko took the World Cup easily by a lcear margin of bonus points.

The F1E title was retained for the third year by Marian Popescu (Romania) with three wins in his results from 10 competitions. Vjtech Zima (Czech Republic) was second and third was Stanislav Kubit (Poland). Fourth place was taken by F1C flyer Alain Roux in his first year of F1E flying. In the junior F1E category the top three places were again taken by Romanian flyers, with Daniel Bildea winning the title for the second year, followed by Andrei Moisescu and, also in the same place as last year, Christian Faur in third.

ORGANISATION

During 2005 almost all results were returned very quickly by email. All competitions except Stonehenge Cup provided results in electronic form, which greatly facilitates processing of the World Cup results.

There were still some competitions which failed to provide FAI licence numbers for each competitor. When this is done it greatly aids recognition of a competitor given that spelling of names often varies between competitions. As usual there were a few problems of names of competitors in different events not being recognised as one person or of junior status not being recorded, which is easily corrected when notified by the competitor. However, it was notable that one correction was supplied late in the year - four months after the event concerned – which affected the results near the top of one event and could have changed decisions by other leaders whether or not to fly in the final events. It would seem that little can be done to prevent this apart from requesting fair play by competitors checking results and immediately notifying any discrepancies.

STATISTICS

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:

[Aeromodelling Commission] - [FF World Cup rules 2005] - [FF World Cup results index]

This page produced by Ian Kaynes