Jet World Masters Report - Thursday August 27

Guten tag von Leutkirch and welcome to the lucky Day 13 report of my vacation adventure.

As you may have noticed, a report wasn’t sent out last night. I went to the McDonalds at 12:15am (it closes at 1am on week nights) but they must have shut off the McWiFi server early. I headed back to the hotel and I couldn’t log on to their network either.
Tonight, both reports are being sent out courtesy of Marco's WiFi hotspot. It's even better than McWiFi, but it doesn't come with a McFlurry.

I had to get to the field by 9am as Scott’s Sabre was being static judged at 9:20am though this was apparently a moving target as the time given yesterday mid-day was 10:20am. Maybe there was a time-zone change or something. The judges were very impressed with the Sabre. Unfortunately, the color scheme is of a full scale Sabre which was painted at a forward base during the Korean Conflict and there are only a couple of photos of it which is a bit of a problem for the documentation and this tends to limit the static score.
The judges made it perfectly clear that the issue was the photos and certainly not the plane. This will be the last appearance of this Sabre at the JWM as Scott has a new project(s).

All members of the team had already completed their second round flights so, other than Scott’s static, we didn’t have all that much to do. The remaining competitors were completing their second flights and the tabulated results were expected in the early afternoon and the third round starts 90 minutes after the scores are released.
The third round is flown in ascending order of score so we were all hopeful that we would not be doing any flying this afternoon, and hopeful that we would have folks flying later tomorrow or even Saturday (top five from each class). Eventually the scores were released, initially on the TV (see attached pics) and later on paper (no electronic, sorry).
The good news is that we don’t fly until tomorrow but the bad news is that none of the team is competing Saturday. Our top pilot is David, who placed 6th in Switzerland, but was 300 points low in his static score (for some unknown reason) here in Leutkirch and is in 12th position.
Our other pilots are spread through the field.

We heard through the grapevine that the static judges were very impressed with the Eurofighter so I went over to take a closer look. It has lots of surface detail and some phenomenal scale details particularly on the landing gear and the cockpit. Attached are a few pics.

As I was waiting for the score sheets to be released, I had the opportunity to do a bit of socializing and lounging in the shade with the Dutch. Laying on the grass in the sun is a bit of a treat as I live in the Arizona desert. Karin’s hip proved to be a comfy pillow.

There wasn’t much happening at the 7pm team managers’ meeting tonight as most of the competitors and managers are exhausted so it was a pretty quiet and short meeting. I elected not to ask when the award ceremony starts on Saturday (the time is not printed in the program) as I didn’t want to give the organizers two days over which they could change their decision.
We were briefed that tonight's party would be "traditional" (I took that to mean that there would be plenty of beer).

We were also told that there would be two queens at the event, namely, the Queen of the Cows, and the Queen of the Cheese.
Unfortunately, the Queen of the Wine would not be there. I told the organizers that, if they needed it, one of our ladies would likely be thrilled to stand in as the Queen of the Wine and are certainly more than qualified. This region of Germany is known for its cows, cheese, and wine and the locals are quite proud of their products. It’s quite an honor to be one of the queens.
It appears that this is a similar sort of thing as being homecoming queen or county fair queen back in the US. I have to think, though, that Queen of the Cows doesn’t sound all that regal.

Also, there seems to be bovine racial issues here in Germany as this queen is Queen of the Brown Cows only. I guess the black cows and white cows have their own queen. Can all cows just all please get along?

The rest of the team went out for a lovely dinner we all went to tonight’s event which was described as a “traditional” event with many people in cultural dress and there would be a band. As we were all flying tomorrow, and some had overindulged during Nation's Night, we took it easy on the booze and Scott apparently discovered some tasty non-alcoholic beverage in a sippy bag.

There was wall to wall leiderhosen as many men wore the traditional German leather shorts with suspenders. There’s just something wrong with that. However, the German ladies have frilly low cut blouses and vests which are cinched up to put the “girls” on display. When it comes to traditions, that one has my full approval.

The band was oom pah pah’ing and there was an interesting song which was accompanied by three guys cracking whips to the beat of the music. It was quite the display and nobody lost an eye.
Later, six musicians with their alpenhorns (those 10 foot long horns you see in the Ricola commercials) gathered on stage to play. See pic. Marco, who had clearly b een sampling the local brewery’s product, asked one when they were going to light up and smoke the pipes.

Vitaly confirmed to me tonight that he and Pavel will come to Top Gun in 2016 with their YAKs. Additionally, we have decided in the spirit of friendship that I, as Jet Team USA Manager, will call for Pavel (Rusjet Team Manager) when he flies the little YAK, and Pavel will call for me when I fly the Gripen. The fun part will be that I have to call in Russian and Pavel will have to call in English. This should be good fun and maybe Sam Wright (Top Gun announcer) will put mics on us for the flight as this might get entertaining.
I can just see Pavel telling me to stop flying like a decadent capitalist or me telling him he is flying like a drunken babushka driving a stolen potato wagon.
Jet modelling, making the world a safer place!

Auf wiedersehen,

Jim