Team USA Report – JWGC Practice & Opening Ceremony

The 2024 Junior World Gliding Championships is the 13th Junior Worlds to be held. It is taking place at the Michaelkow Airfield in Ostrow Wielkopolski, central Poland and is being run by the Aeroklub Ostrow. Ostrow is a pleasant small city in the middle of rural Poland with a typical continental European climate. The airfield itself is a large grass airfield large enough to accommodate direct landings (no pattern) after finishing in either east or west directions. It is a thriving gliding club with excellent facilities and tow planes.

For this contest we have sent 4 Junior pilots from the far corners of the USA. There are 67 pilots entered from 20 countries competing in 2 classes, Standard Class and Club class. These pilots are the best up and coming contest pilots in the world, and it is a great environment for them to become part of the World gliding scene and a deep honor to represent their country. Many top gliding careers are launched here and many life-long friendships are made.

All pilots are renting gliders from different countries in Europe – Czech, Poland, UK and Germany. Eric has worked tirelessly on promotional support, crew shirts that were the envy of the grid, even sunglasses for the pilots.

Long international journeys for all many taking 2 very long days to get to Ostrow. Pilots crew and captain arrived 3 -4 days before the start of official training to acclimatize and get organized before the official training period started.

All pilots were able to fly and debug gliders, computers, radios and get airspace and terrain debriefing from the local Polish pilots before the official practice began. Focus of the pilots was initially in fixing radios, flarm range issues, pee tubes, bug wipers etc and getting through scrutineering successfully which was managed by the close of the 2nd official practice day.

Team Captain Peter Deane was busy coaching, problem solving, advising and establishing the team tracking and radio base camp and helping the whole team to converge on full functionality by the end of the final practice day. Practice period was also essential for the team captain so that the team functions, pilot and crew routines could all be debugged in time for contest day 1.

The first full team (pilots, crew and helpers) meeting was held 2nd practice day morning prior to getting the gliders through scrutineering. follow regulation requirements. Sounds easy. It is not. Lots of moving parts and details to take care of to make sure all equipment and dococumentation passes muster and we had clean scrutineering, safe gliders and clean documentation.

The flying – most pilots had at least 2 full task completion days during the practice period. The first official practice day had good weather and a healthy number of active competitors especially in Club class. Tom Greenhill in Standard finished 2nd out of 15 starts and Steven and David in Club finished 11th and 12th respectively out of 25 starts.

We lost the second and third official practice days to scrutineering and poor weather both days. We enjoyed a pleasant welcome party in the briefing hangar at the end of official practice to the gentle serenade of a major thunderstorm and torrential downpour. Followed the next evening by the Opening Ceremony which was a no-fly day.