Cool Beans 2016: Count down to Tuesday morning

NToday was a scorching day in Arizona, with temperatures of over 100 here, and apparently over 120 in Phoenix. It still gets pleasantly cool at night, but you can't spend any length of time outdoors during the day.

This was a day of mandatory racer briefings, all held on campus at the Embry Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott. After roll call, we had general briefings including topics like safety, judging, penalties and appeals, and a briefing on using the technology that we have for the race. We carry two types of tracker with us. The SPOT tracker reports your GPS position back to the central SPOT website, and this data provides the map of where all the racers are at any given time, and how they are moving through the course (http://www.airraceclassic.org/follow-the-race.htm). Bad Elf is also a GPS tracker, which almost continuously records a lot of data including position, speed, altitude, winds directly onto the device - these trackers are collected and downloaded at the end of the race and, together with information from the timers and the racers themselves, is used to calculate the final score.

We had a couple hours later in the afternoon to work on the race charts and planning, and then it was time for the Start Banquet, attended by the Chancellor of Embry Riddle, volunteers, sponsors, racers and friends and families of the racers. Each pair of racers was announced and came up to receive a medallion showing the route in miniature. The speaker was the VP of Communications for AOPA (the Aircraft Owners and Pilots' Association). Linda's election to the position of Timing and Scoring Director was announced! She joins Barbara, Mary and Juliet among the other ARC Directors and Associate Directors, so congratulations to her and to all the volunteers.

One more day to go, then Tuesday morning we're off!

Before I get to the photos