Adelles Belles 2010: Sunday - less than two days to go!

Today was another ground day, as usual in the run-up to the race. The planes are impounded post-inspection, so we can't go into them to take things out or pack things up, or even go near them without an official escort. Today the main business was a morning briefing by Gretchen Jahn (Air Race veteran and former CEO of Mooney), with information about race safety and general procedures. Gretchen even gave us lots of sensible advice like - drink lots of water; take snacks because you might go all day without eating; remember to file an Air Race flight plan each day; and (most important) remember to always lean the engine! This year there are quite a few towered airport stops; and en route there is one Class C and several Class D airports, plus a whole bunch of special use airspace, restricted areas and military operations areas, so we are going to be busy managing airspace, either by flying over or under it, around it, or making nice with air traffic control. Tomorrow we get the detailed briefing of all the flyby procedures and technical details.

Our table at the briefing: (front L to front R): Team DC3 Pat Manos-Kraemer, Debi Dreyfuss, Linda Litwin; Team Zippy Chicks Barb Harris-Para and Laurie Zaleski; Team Adelles Belles (Alison) and Mary; and Team Rick's Chicks Ethel Bailey and Barb Zeigler. Most of these ladies are in the Mid-Atlantic Section of The Ninety-Nines.

The ever-controversial subject of handicapping was also covered today. In previous years, airplanes have been assigned legacy air race handicaps of uncertain provenance, which have definitely favored some makes and models of airplanes over others. Also, it was always best to race a stock airplane (like our Arrow), because the speed penalties for modifications like gap seals were disproportionately large. So this year they broke completely with tradition, and flew a handicapping flight for each and every airplane in the race. This meant a lot of work by the Board pilots, who flew all over the country to accomplish this task. The airplanes were each loaded to race weight, and flown at race speed by one of the pilots (Mary in our case) in each of the four cardinal compass directions for long enough for a lot of readings to be taken. The final handicaps take into account density altitude and so on, and should in theory be much fairer than in previous years, and account much better for each individual airplane. The final handicaps were in fact released later in the day. Our Arrow is handicapped at 147.74 kt this year - compare this to last year's handicap of 128.61!! Now the historic handicaps related to cruise speed, and the new ones are at race speed, so one can't necessarily compare the two, but this seems quite a high hurdle for us. It really depends if everyone else has a similarly high handicap...

So this is one big unknown in the race this year. The other one is that more than two thirds of the racers are newbies! This is great as it shows that lots of new blood is coming into the sport, and how many great women pilots there are who are willing to give it a go. But it also means that the 2010 field is a big unknown right now.

Here's an example of one of the flyby procedures - more on this tomorrow!

After lunch with Barb and Ethel, Mary and I spent the afternoon doing chart review. In the evening we had the Takeoff Banquet, during which each pair of racers was presented with charms of the race route. Alison ate too much, so went for a late night session in the gym afterwards.

Table at the banquet, with our table in the background: