by Ian Kaynes Chairman, CIAM FF Subcommittee March 1989

The 1988 FAI Free Flight World Cup was a success and attracted increased interest from competitors and organisers worldwide. To further augment the status of the event there is the welcome news that World Cup trophies have been donated by Lord Thompson, thanks to arrangements made by Peter Allnutt (Canada). There are three trophies, one for each class F1A, F1B and F1C, and it is planned to present them to the 1988 winners at the CIAM Plenary meeting at Paris in March 1989. The trophies will be held for one year and then presented to the 1989 winners and so on.

Circumstances dictated that there were only 10 competitions in the 1988 World Cup (two less than in 1987) and these were held in USA (2), Norway, Australia, Hungary, Netherlands, Sweden, France, Yugoslavia and West Germany. A total 298 competitors recorded scores over the three classes and the winners were as follows:

F1A Stefan Rumpp West Germany 48 points (places: 1, 2, 12)

F1B Walt Ghio U.S.A. 70 points (places: 1, 1, 2)

F1C Thomas Koster Denmark 65 points (places: 1, 1, 3)

The F1A results were particularly close, with the runner-up Matt Gewain of USA coming within one point of the winning score in the last event of the series, the Sierra Cup held at Sacramento. It is notable that once again there are two winners from Europe and one from USA, confirming that the event is indeed of World status and not totally dominated by the majority of competitions being in Europe.

Following some problems in 1987, this year ALL organisers met the requirement to return their results within seven days of the competition - greatly improving the compilation of up-to-date results during 1988. The attached results include one correction that was required after the first issue of final results. This caused Bror Eimar of Sweden to move into second place in F1B ahead of Bernhard Sauter (West Germany), due to an omission from Eimar’s score, which was sportingly drawn to my attention by Mr Sauter. The error arose because one of Mr Eimar’s results had been entered under another name (Mr E Bror!) and so not combined with his scores. A larger and faster computer is being purchased so that next year it will be possible to cross-check both first names and family names - different organisers and competitors oscillate between presenting names in the order "first name, family name" or "family name, first-name".

There has been some discussion in the CIAM Free Flight Subcommittee of changing the points allocations or the selection of competitions. These have not brought about any changes and the 1989 World Cup will operate under the same system as this year. However, it is intended to continue to review the possibility of adding more competitions (such as a maximum of two per country but competitors only counting the better one result in any one country) or of changing the points allocation to place a little less emphasis on winners. Open for discussion but there are NO changes for 1989.

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