Montana schoolboy heading for Eastern Europe for gliding championship
A schoolboy of Pretoria is part of the South African team that will participate in Romania in the world championships for Thermal Duration Model Gliders.
A Montana teenager is heading for Romania in Eastern Europe for the F3J Class World Championships for so-called ‘Thermal Duration Model Gliders’.
Aldo Vos, a grade 10 student of Hoërskool Montana, is the number-one junior pilot in the SA team for this exciting sport. The rest of the team consists of the team manager and two senior pilots as well as an extra ‘tower’. Two towers are required to pull the planes up since mechanical winches are not allowed at the world championships.
According to experts, South Africa has a great climate for radio controlled model gliders because we have sunny weather and ‘active air’ on most days throughout the year.
Most people think about model planes as toys used in a hobby. However, the sport is highly competitive and the best technology is used in building these planes. They are build from carbon composite materials to be very strong but feather light for their size. The wingspan allowed for these models are four metres.
In the classic F3J model glider class the objective is to launch as fast as possible, thermal for the full working time allowed and land on time exactly on a spot. The competition is objective and points are allocated based on every second in the air, without overflying the working time. Landing points are based on the centimetre distance away from a landing spot.
The planes are fast, launches are intense and landings put huge strain on the airplanes. While thermaling you need to find thermals to stay up for 10 minutes. Your teammate can help with reading the air and constantly tell you what is happening in the parts of the sky you cannot see.
Vos started his interest in model planes from a very early age. Some of his first memories were of him going with his dad to the flying field. He owned his first fixed wing glider at age 11. Two weeks after receiving this own glider, he was flying solo.
At the age of 14 he started to focus on competitive glider flying. Since then he has put in all the effort to become the new number-one model glider pilot in South Africa. Today at the age of 15 he flies several different classes of gliders.
Vos is coached by experienced pilots, who last year also helped another South African, Tiaan van Rooyen, to achieve gold in the F3K world championship. The sport is obviously expensive and the South African team members will mainly be responsible for their own travel expenses to Romania.
Interested parties who want to Schoolboy taking on world with his glider 15-year-old Aldo Vos with his model glider during a practice session. know more about the sport or the championship can visit the SA team’s website at https://makeachamp.com/ samodelgliderteam2018f3j . Mike Vos can be contacted via email at rsaf3j2018@gmail.com .
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