The 9th World Microlight championships and the 3rd FAI World PPG Championships at Long Marston Airfield near Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire is over. 

The weather between 23 and 31 August 2003 stunned everybody, what happened to all that wind and rain?  The entire week was characterized by light winds and sunny, often soarable conditions.

For the first time the ‘Para classes’, the PPG’s, single seat para-trikes and two seat para-trikes constituted the larger part of the championships with 75 aircraft from 17 nations competing against each other as compared to 60 aircraft from 12 nations in the ‘Classic classes’.  Quite what this means for the future has yet to be discussed, but they are still rapidly expanding and are no longer the sideshow of former years.

The para classes organizers also provided GPS flight recorders to all competitors, courtesy of the French federation FFPlUM, which were used as the primary source of flight verification in all cross-country tasks and some local ones.  This was a stunning success.; the reliability rate was better than 95% (see a detailed analysis) which compares extremely favourably with alternative means such as photos, ground markers or observers.  Besides being very easy to extract (4 man hours for 75 recorders) and much easier to analyse than ‘traditional’ methods, all tracks were made available to all competitors in the ‘Internet café’ and this helped immeasurably in maintaining a happy group of competitors and the championship resulted in no ‘official’ protests and a very small number of complaints.

All the Para-classes tasks and task results are available on this website now.  The Classic Classes results are still being compiled and will be made available as soon as possible.

As the days after the championships go by more ‘what happened’ information will be put on this site.  If you have anything to say or photos to add, just send them to rmh@flymicro.com

 

Thanks

The following are some of the unsung heroes of the championship without whom it would not have been a success.

Classic Classes	Para Classes
Dawn Dewhurst Jeremy Hucker	Jose Luis Esteban Joel Amiable Barty Meredith-Hardy Janet Haynes Robbie Kelly Jancy Kelly Pat Harris Geoff Soden David Knibbs Mike Haines Estelle Chevalier Kevin Taylor Pat Chilton Ed Cunliffe Geoff Tomlin

 

Contact

Event Director: Keith Negal keith@negal.com

Classic classes : Rob Keene rob@overfarm.freeserve.co.uk

PPG, PL1 & PL2 Director: Richard Meredith-Hardy rmh@flymicro.com

What happened at..

The 2003 UK National championships

The 2002 European championships

The 2002 UK National championships

The 2001 World Air Games PPG Championships

The 2001 UK National championships

The 2000 PPG European Championships

The 2000 test World Air Games PPG Championship

The 2000 UK National championships

The 1999 PPG World Championships
 
Other information

GNSS Flight recorders

FAI, the World Airsports Federation

the British Microlight Aircraft Association