2005 World Freeflight Championships

摘要

To say the 2005 World Free Flight Championships at Embalse, Argentina was a triumph for the United States is a bit of an understatement. Competing against the world's top flyers from 31 national teams, the nine US flyers took two team gold medals and an individual bronze, silver and gold medal, one in each of the three classes, as well as the silver in the overall Challenge France, based on total scores in all three events. F1A glider winner, Mike McKeever, flying on the US team for the first time, had a smile a mile wide for ages afterwards. Argentina hosted the Championships on the same site as they used for the contest in 1989, but what was then a grass-covered military airfield had now been sold to farmers and was covered with the remains of maize, with stiff stalks that were bad news for the covering of dethermalising models. This site was used for the "warm-up" World Cup contest, but the organizers moved to a rather better adjacent field for the Championships. In some directions uncut corn reaching to head height lurked as a downwind model trap, while a large lake and an adjacent nuclear power station were to cause recovery problems for some teams.