Air Navigation Rally at the EAA 2023 Convention

By Tarryn Myburgh

18.06.2023



The Experimental Aircraft Association of South Africa invited the SA Power Flying Association to host a fun event at their annual convention to be held in Middelburg on 10 June 2023. We decided to do the event in the form of an Air Navigation Rally or ANR.


The short 20km long ANR drew seven entries. The winners were Chris and Richard Baker followed by Lauric Hilhorst and Nathan Olver with Deon Coetzee and Linden Knoetze in third.

An ANR is a relatively new form of competition with short flight times where competitors must navigate down narrow twisting corridors. The scoring works based on penalty points. The first five seconds outside the corridor are not scored but thereafter, every second outside the corridor scores 3 penalty points.

For this fun event, the start and finish gate were not timed. Only time out of the corridor was penalised so that teams could focus on navigation rather than timing.


Sean Cronin and Marie Reddy

The corridor was set to 0.5nm wide starting with three easier legs that followed roads. The route then increased in difficulty as teams had to navigate using farmhouses, topography, mines and other nearby features.

While a few teams were caught out and overflew the very short third leg or followed the wrong road to the 'start point', all the teams enjoyed the route, which roughly spells EAA (turn the map upside down).

Congratulations to the top three, who all flew incredibly well. The overall winners, Chris and Richard Baker were only out of the corridor for 112seconds on their third leg, resulting in 321 penalty points. They were followed very closely by Lauric Hilhorst and Nathan Olver with 357 points and Deon Coetzee and Linden Knoetze with 453 points.


First place goes to Chris and Richard Baker


The second-place results of Lauric Hilhorst and Nathan Olver


The third-place results of Deon Coetzee and Linden Knoetze


Once you get off track, it is very difficult to find your way back!



South Africa will be hosting ANR Nationals later this year, so keep an eye on our website www.sapfa.co.za or contact us for more info.


If you are interested in finding out more about Rally Flying, Speed Rally, ANR or our other events, please don't hesitate to contact us or sign up for our newsletter. We would love to hear from you.


A huge thank you to the EAA for inviting us and to their members for supporting us. We hope that everyone had fun, we most certainly did. See you at the next one!












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