End of Season Report GPS-Triangle (2022)

After two years of “Corona-break”, GPS-Triangle Pilots from all over Europe (and even from other parts of the world) finally could meet again to compete on the flying sites!
This year was actually the first year for the new Lightclass to be flown in the CONTEST-Eurotour.
All in all there are three classes of GPS-Triangle soaring:

• The Lightclass for planes up to 4m span and maximum of 30gr/dm² wingloading.
• The Sportclass for planes up to 5m span and a maximum of 75gr/dm² wingloading.
• The Scaleclass for scale-ships up to 25kg and a maximum of 115gr/dm²wingloading.

The Scaleclass actually combines two categories with one unlimited self launching planes and another limited to a scale of “1:3” which are aerotowed.
Unfortunately the year after Corona still saw some reservation in people to travel and thus few competitions needed to be cancelled. We all hope 2023 will come back with more fellow competitors travelling to the venues.

2022 saw some great modelsport with one highlight definitely being the first world masters in the Sportsclass held in July in the vicinity of Ulm (Germany). The local Glider Club did a marvelous job directing 17 heats for 39 pilots!
Sadly two of the scheduled CONTEST-Eurotour events needed to be cancelled, so that in the Sportsclass (besides that amazing world masters) there were only two competitions countable in this years` tour.

In the Lightclass 5 competitions went ahead as scheduled with participants from Czech Republic, Germany, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Switzerland. It is clearly visible, that in this particular class interests are growing. We could see as much as 26 competitors on one competition which clearly justifies the invention of this class. Planes for the light class are easy to obtain as they are virtually identical to F5J planes but can be way more robust and heavy. Nevertheless the cross flow between F5J and GPS-Lightclass pilots is rather small – less than expected – which might come down to the fact, that flying with GPS equipment requires a certain amount sophistication. In any case, these skills can be learned, are far from rocket science and in the end will offer the pilots a whole new experience of soaring. The systems for navigation are also easy to obtain and very affordable meanwhile, so that we are certain about more new pilots to fly Lightclass competitions in the near future.
The Lightclass saw a new venue in 2022 as well. Ralph Losemann from Riesa invited to a first Lightclass-competition on the huge glider port of Riesa-Canitz (GER), which is situated about 50km northwest of Dresden. The atmosphere and friendship on the field was fantastic and we hope to be able to compete on that flying site soon again.
At the end of the season it is great to see that there were 2-days-competitions as well as 1-day-competitions and both were attractive out of various reasons. To compensate for bad weather a 2-days-event certainly has advantages as for many taking one day off on a weekend is easier to manage than being off for the whole weekend.

In Scaleclass there were 6 competitions flown in total, 3 of them with the “1:3” rule set and 3 with the “SLS” rule set. It is obvious, that the Scaleclass is the “Classic-GPS-Triangle-Class” and meanwhile perfectly established. The numbers of competitors is stable in the range of 20 per competition which makes the airfields quite busy already, but allows the pilots to get lots of airtime during the competitions. It is quite uplifting to see, that there are also newcomers to this, very specialized Class. So at the end of the season there were quite a few new names visible on the score sheets.
For example Honza Rudolf from Czech Republic, Thomas Leitgeb from Austria who started flying Sportsclass last year bringing his own built Quintus to fly Scaleclass 2022. But also names like Falk Waidelich, who builds his own LS6 in foam-obechi-technique, could compete astonishingly well similar to Florian Griese from Berlin who brought along a homebuilt ASH-31! Furthermore there was some “cross flow” from other classes detectable. Jure Marc from Slovenia who is regularly flying F3F joined two Scaleclass competitions and Michael Kreß (GER), who won several big F3J and F5J competitions is now joining the Scaleclass circle and placing extremely well. Finally he managed to take 7th place in the overall CONTEST-Eurotour results for 2022. Congratulations.

As we spoke of results, let’s finally give a breakdown of the 2022 CONTEST-Eurotour results for all GPS-Triangle Classes.
The Scaleclass saw some exciting races with very tight deviations in the scores. In the very last competition of the year Holger Genkinger (GER) could take the win with a perfect 300% score.
2nd place went to Andreas Kunz (GER) with just 0,34% behind! He was followed by Daniel Aeberli (SUI) in 3rd place.

Winners in Scaleclass 2022:

1st: Holger Genkinger GER (Schambeck Quintus / Schambeck AN-66 / Chocofly Nimbus-2c)
2nd: Andreas Kunz GER (Schambeck ASW-22 race)
3rd: Daniel Aeberli SUI (Chocofly Diana-2 / Chocofly ASW-17 / Chocofly Nimbus-2c)
Total number of competitors: 37 from 8 Nations

Winners in Sportclass 2022:

1st: Philip Kolb GER (Samba-model Pike Paradigm / Baudismodel Calvados)
2nd: Jens Geider GER (Chocofly Appollo 46)
3rd: Hans-Peter Bell GER (Chocofly Appollo 46)
Total number of competitors: 20 from 2 Nations

Future prospects for the 2023-CONTEST-Season:
The plans for the upcoming season are already running and we will definitely try to set the dates for 2023 as favorable as possible. Especially for the Sportclass we would have fewer cancellations of competitions. Momentary there are already two new venues wanting to organize competitions in 2023 as after the Sportclass worldmasters new enthusiasm for this class was created even in other countries than Switzerland and Germany!

We will also see a change in organizational platforms.
The newly created platform www.rcmodelspot.com will be an “all-in-1-tool” to organize, enter and score competitions. Furthermore, everyone uploading flights directly from the navigation tablet will be able to replay and analyze their flights.
With this feature it will be possible to replay and review complete competition heats, which is an awesome feature. Not only for competition pilots, but also for those who might want to watch competitions at their home screens! www.gps-triangle.net will sponsor CONTEST-Eurotour GPS-Triangle competition reviews, so that people at home can get a better idea about the sport of GPS-Triangle flying for free.
During the Beta test-phase this feature was already tested on the Sportsclass Worldmasters in Ulm.

You can watch the explanations and comments about one heat with analysis of pilots` flight decisions here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mw9_kuFkE7l
This video will give you a great overview about the future possibilities.
We surely will keep you posted and hope to meet you on one or the other airfield across Europe to fly GPS-Triangle – The closest you can get to full size soaring with a model aircraft!