Sparsely Attended World Meet Concludes in Lakeland

It was the Aerobatic World Championships, what the local Lakeland (FL) "news" radio station called, "The Olympics of Soaring." Honest.

ANN stopped in (despite some lackluster 'encouragement' and advance work from IAC and other involved parties) to see what was to see; but the general disorganization of the event itself (not the flying!) took away from the enjoyment.

For instance, on opening day, the Lakeland (FL) police set up detours around the area below the contest box. They didn't want people driving around, below the area; it was sure to confuse the pilots, they must have thought.

The problem was, they got the streets wrong.

The result: you ended up where you started.

On Saturday morning, when a balloon race had been announced for a 7AM start, the only people who were there were the marvelous Sun 'n Fun volunteers -- not one balloon team showed up; the forecast had said rain was on the way.

The morning was beautiful, however, for the race that didn't happen.

A couple of days into the event, nobody could tell us where the announced seminars were being held...

Big deal -- we expect a lot of this from Sun 'n Fun's 'organizers.' At least for this event, there weren't any "crowds" to disappoint. That's really too bad, for the USA (which has any number of decent venues), for the competitors, and ultimately for the WAC. However... the flying's the thing!

Fly they did -- competitors from around the world braved the event itself, fought the unpredictable rain, the changing winds, and the soggy grounds, and flew their heads off for a week.

When the teams and support staff (which looked like it comprised nearly the entire attendance, sadly) left, the Russians had dominated -- Overall (top 3 places), Men's (top 2 places), Women's (top 3 places), and Team.

With a Woman again right up there (second overall), the question of "Why a Women's category at all?" again came up... and wasn't answered.

You'll be hearing more about that later, we expect.

The scores on some days were lower than expected; but remember that the box had been rotated often, to compensate for the changing winds -- and the winds were truly awesome on some days.

In fact, the weather

...always a favorite topic among competitors, was the nearly-exclusive topic all week.

It eventually did delay enough flights that the Championships, this year, were foreshortened; but not foreshortened enough that some spectacular flying couldn't take place.

Nobody got hurt; nobody's plane got wrecked; everyone got here OK, and left smiling -- the results are now available on WAC's website--which also could use a lot of updating... as of 7/7/03, the last few days commentary, up through July 4th, had yet to appear.

FMI: www.wac2003.org