WMC07

With the weather being awful I was up in the spare room doing some painting and spied the flight bag and it got me thinking about the use of Map Board and the importance of it in the forthcoming comps. Last year I designed and introduced a rotating board which made a significant difference to workload on tasks.

The reason it made such a difference was for two reasons - it rotated and also its size.

The rotation makes a massive difference because when you are flying back down tracks you often need to orientate yourself, this is easier in a enclosed cockpit machine - you just turn the map - this is trickier in a trike when a simple turn of the map could result in you loosing it over the side. I attached a seperate piece of perpsex to a nut and this allowed me to rotate the map easily when ever turning direction - on a circular nav task this made things considerably easy.

Size also makes a huge difference - the abilty to have everything to hand when flying the task is really important, time spent looking for information with your head buried in your map board could mean you loose a photo or a vital turnpoint. David Hadley (british team member) arrived in Germany with a huge piece of perspex and crafted one to fit alot of information, “the office ” as it was called become a successful in the practice week but for various reasons David resorted to using his back up.

All this leaves me thinking do I continue with my existing board or develop another through the season - I certainly need to make mine a little larger (the czechs like their photos) and also a lot lighter. We’ll see.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 20th, 2007 at 6:05 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.