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RTWR 2013 Final Outcome Announced

Willy

Willy

Administrator
Staff member
I've been asked by Race Committee to make this announcement for them.


RTWR 2013 Final Outcome Announced

The eleventh running of the Around-The-World-Race (RTWR 2013) was completed very early on Wednesday morning (UTC). The Race began in Cape Town at 1500UTC Saturday and ran around the clock until the teams completed the circuit in the South African darkness.

This year's winner is Team AVSIM who managed to finish a smoothly executed error-free race. While outperformed in some respects by Team FlightSim and Team Sim-Outhouse, the AVSIM crew managed an overall performance that gave them the win.

The final "Race Times" (elapsed time adjusted for penalties and bonuses) are:

Team AVSIM: 76:18
Team FlightSim: 77:47
Team Sim-Outhouse: 80:19

Congratulations to all the participants who managed to keep the batons flying through day and night, through tropical lows and Aleutian snowstorms, and into and out of mountain airstrips. All the Teams and pilots are commended on a job well done. The Tornado Trophy having been retired after a decade, we are happy to announce Team AVSIM as the first recipients of the Bendit Trophy.


I'd like to personally add that Team Sim-Outhouse did an excellent job as usual and I'd like to congratulate everyone who participated.
 
Team SOH tried hard this year but unfortunately Mr. Murphy decided it was our year to get hit. Our route was as good as the other teams and our average speed was high enough that had we not had a couple of mishaps we could have been in with a very good chance of winning.

The biggest problem we faced was a severe lack of pilots despite repeated appeals for new team members. This year we had just TWELVE PILOTS who carried the baton! That is simply not enough people to compete in an event that runs for 4 days continuously. Pilots need to rest and more importantly sleep between turns with the baton and we weren't able to do that. Out of a total of 53 legs flown we were forced to fly eight without a 'wingman' and that is a very dangerous situation. We lost over an hour in 'real time' when one of our pilots had a computer/sim lock-up when he was flying without a 'wingman'. That happened when he was an hour into his flight and as he had no 'wingman' to pass the baton to we had to start the leg over again (every 'wingman' transfer costs the team a 30 minute penalty). Trying to pull back an hour's flight time lost like that is very hard to do! On the final day we had one pilot who flew four consecutive legs as a 'wingman' just so that we could cycle baton pilots in order to keep the baton moving forward. That's 6 hours 51 minutes of continuous competitive flying and then he took a break for 1.5 hours while I flew a leg without a 'wingman' so that he could prepare for another 3 hour flight halfway across the Atlantic Ocean. Almost 10 hours of racing with just a short break in-between the two sessions is too much to expect any pilot to take on and Martin (Spookster67) deserves the recognition and support for the effort he put in for Team SOH!

SOH has a membership in excess of 7,000 people and yet, despite repeated appeals for help, we could only get twelve pilots to fly in this year's race. To put it as bluntly as I can (without getting banned from the site) that is pathetic! Team SOH represents the entire membership in the race and yet only twelve people out of more than 7,000 could be bothered to get off their butts and take part this year, what a sad state of affairs we have come to!

It's not difficult to fly in the race, you don't have to be a 'super pilot' in order to compete ('Otto' has the controls for 95% of the time anyway), you just need to have the desire to challenge yourself and get out of your 'comfort zone'.

We hope to generate some more interest over the coming year by holding a few events to try to encourage 'new blood' to join us but it takes you as a forum member to actively take part. We can create the events but there is no point if nobody wants to take part in them. We are especially short of pilots in the 'UTC +' time zones like Australia, New Zealand and the Far East. Their time zones are extremely beneficial as they are able to fly when the rest of us are grabbing some much needed sleep. This year we had just two pilots in the UK and the rest were in North America and that made it very hard to cover the NA night sessions. Sleep was a luxury that few people got!

If we can't get more pilots by next year then Team SOH may just have to throw in the towel and admit that apathy won the day and that's a day I don't want to face!
 
Hang in there Larry. I would have like to have participated this year but unfortunately the family already had plans which could not be changed. Always next year. Seems like you guys did very well.
 
Sorry about not being able to participate. Real life work schedule. Iam back to working every weekend for awhile.
The race looks like a lot of fun. Great effort by all.
 
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