H5606

Continuing other issues to address: putting a time limit on certain events may be warranted to keep things moving forward and prevent waning interest (I decided a max of 5 minutes for the balloon busting task); making sure the contestants know the rules of the task at hand - perhaps a demo would have been helpful for all involved; I didn't formally shut down the field for this fun-fly and thought it might become a problem, but it seemed to turn out alright; keeping things moving smoothly like not having to stand around and wait for the next guy to bring his airplane up to the flight-line and startup or collect a downed airplane; I could have combined the last two events into one flight per contestant but forgot; what I thought would only take an hour to run with six contestants actually took a couple hours along with a tallying of scores and brief awards ceremony...

Worth a mention here - I don't know if there's an official name, but I called it a "blind taxi balloon bust" - it was relayed to me by a colleague at work and I was able to describe it to the contestants without ever having seen it myself. It involves the pilot taxiing into a balloon with their back turned to the flight-line while being directed by verbal commands to the target by a (supposed to be) non-flying assistant or spouse in the shortest time. It looked like fun - at least from a spectator's point of view. Had to laugh when one pilot asked his assistant if his airplane was even moving yet... The wingless trainer races mentioned earlier sound like lots of fun as well.