FAI Free Flight World Cup 2008

This was another successful year for the Free Flight World Cup with 4329 total entries in all the events, a record number from an increased number of competitions in all classes. The average number of competitors per competition increased slightly to a level higher than the last 5 years.

2008 saw two changes in the Free Flight World Cup related to the class F1P. Following the 2007 Plenary decision F1P Junior was added as a new class. In addition F1P could be flown alongside F1C models and be counted in the results for the F1C World Cup. As anticipated, this proved more controversial. Some confusion was added where F1P was flown as a separate event from F1C at some competitions, at others it was flown at the same time and to the same flight times as F1C, and on other occasions no F1P event was scheduled but competitors followed the new rule and flew F1P alongside F1C in the F1C competition.

The F1A World Cup was won by Per Findahl of Sweden., with a victory on bonus points ahead of the 2006 and 2007 winner Roland Koglot. This is Per’s 5th time winning this Cup which is a record for F1A and places him level for greatest number of wins with Andrjukov in F1B and Verbitsky in F1C. F1A-Junior was retained by the 2007 winner Janis Zarins of Latvia.

F1B was won by Igor Vivchar (Ukraine) by a lead of just 2 bonus points over British flyer Michael Woolner, who was also 2 points ahead of third place Ivan Kolic, the 2007 winner. The winning margins were tighter in F1B Junior, Alexandra Warakomska (Poland) winning by a single point from last year’s winner Oskar Findahl and just another single point to third place Tomaz Slokar (Slovenia).

Kaarle Kuukka of Finland won F1C from the 2007 winner Reinhard Truppe (Austria) and third place Gabor Zsengeller (Hungary).

F1Q events did not have enough competitors to trigger bonus points and Klaus Salzer (Austria) beat Andreas Lindner (Germany) by virtue of 4 wins against 3. The new F1P Junior category was won by Johannes Seren of Germany as the only flyer with two victories.

The victories in F1E competitions were distributed between many flyers so that no single person achieved 3 wins. Jaromir Orel was victorious with two wins and a second place ahead of Ivan Treger of Slovakia and Florian Draghici of Romania. It is worth noting that this second place completes a year of exceptionally broad success for Ivan Treger, winning the World Championships in F1D and the European Championships in F1E, and placing 6th in the F1A European Championships.

Armin Mang (Austria) won F1E Junior ahead of Jakub Drmla (Slovakia) and Katarzyna Szymanska(Poland)

ORGANISATION

Most 2008 results were returned very quickly by email and there were only a few minor delays with some slow results or organisers supplying results as pdf files.

Two competitions in Slovakia in April were postponed by one week, the announcement made about 2 weeks in advance, after previously very poor response to communications. Postponement at such short notice penalises competitors who had planned to attend but cannot rearrange time and travel at such short notice. The question of eligibility of the event for the World Cup was posed to the Free Flight Subcommittee and the majority view was that the competitions remained included in the World Cup. The Von Hafe Cup in Portugal was scheduled to be run on the new dates of the Slovakia events and, whether related or not, the Von Hafe was cancelled for lack of entries.

Another competition lost was the F1Q event within the USA Nationals. This event was flown but not accepted for the World Cup when it was acknowledged that few of the competitors had FAI licences. Apart from that there was almost complete return of FAI Licence numbers with the results.

A number of organisers asked during the year for the addition of F1Q to their events. These requests were agreed, using an exceptional degree of flexibility in order to encourage the new electric class.

STATISTICS

The individual events F1A, F1A-Junior, etc show the numbers relevant to that event. The column headed ALL is the total of number of competitors in the full events (F1A B C E Q) which takes account of the fact that juniors have also been included in the results of the full event.

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