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Varsity 2019 report
== Past reports ==
=== 2019 ===
Report by Charlie Brooker.
==== Day 1 ====
Scrub! Despite getting up very early, the decision was made to scrub Tuesday due to low cloud. CUGC instead watched a brief display of old cars on site at Bicester and played card games.
==== Day 2 ====
[[File:Varsity2019Day2.jpg|thumb|right|The team on Day 2.]]
Despite a poor start to the morning with solid cloud at 900ft and broken at 600ft, the weather improved over lunch. While the weather wasn’t kind enough to gift us with thermals for our standard height-gain competition rules, the cloud did lift enough for the bad weather rules: spot landings!
The rules for this event were decided upon beforehand as follows: A marker would be set up on the ground, visible to all pilots approaching for landing. The pilot would then have to touch down and roll to a stop as close to the line as possible. Wheel brake was strictly forbidden; all flights were taken in two-seaters and an instructor would be sat in the back of each flight to verify the lack of wheel brake. The distance between the glider’s main wheel and the marker would then be measured in Chris’ feet (Chris-ft). This distance was then added to 30 then 3000 would be divided by this result to give the score (i.e. with a distance, d, the score = 3000/(30+d) ), thereby giving a higher score for those who land closer to the marker.
There was time for each team to attempt their first two spot landings on Wednesday afternoon, leaving Cambridge with a score of 86 and Oxford with 68.
==== Day 3 ====
[[File:Varsity2019Day3.jpg|thumb|right|Both teams on Day 3.]]
Thursday saw a markedly warmer weather; perfect for the beach but still no soaring to start with. So, it was agreed that the first round of spot landings would be completed, by which time some soaring may be possible. Cambridge scored a decisive lead in the spot landings, with CUGC flights from Hugh and Bonan both scoring above 60 points.
As hoped, the sun came out and thermals began just before lunch! OUGC’s Chia-Man getting a 32-minute duration flight to give Oxford a clear soaring lead to begin with. The conditions were tricky; making one wrong decision left you low, scratching for height-gains and looking to land. OUGC scored very highly after lunch as well managing two 35-point soaring flights from Philipp and Arthur. CUGC’s best soaring flight was Timo’s 21 minutes.
Once the thermals had stopped and the hangar had been packed, the task of tabulating the scores and discovering the winner began.
Warning: boring technical details in this paragraph… To enable easier comparison between the scores for spot-landings and the scores for the soaring flights, both sets of scores were scaled and translated individually. This was done in such a way that the mean for the spot landings was 100 and the standard deviation was 15; the same was true of the set of soaring flight scores. This meant that the scores for each team could then be summed to give the total scores. Also, since Oxford’s sixth team member was unable to come to Varsity, Cambridge selected their five best soaring flights and their five best spot landings.
==== Summary ====
After significant calculations, the final score was: '''Oxford 1009 – 990 Cambridge''', a win for Oxford. CUGC would like to send a big “Thank you!” to OUGC and Bicester Gliding Club for hosting us; the clubhouse is very nice and the airfield seems to have an unlimited number of landing areas!
We look forward to hosting OUGC at Gransden in summer 2020.
{| class="wikitable"
! Team !! Pilot !! Normalised Spot Landing !! Normalised Soaring !! Total
|-
! scope="row" rowspan="6" | Cambridge
| Charlie Brooker
| 111.1
| -
| rowspan="6" | 990
|-
| Bonan Zhu
| 113.2
| 89.3
|-
| Chris Barrott
| 111.1
| 84.0
|-
| Timo Wilken
| -
| 102.7
|-
| Hugh Hudson
| 112.6
| 96.0
|-
| Hayk Saribekyan
| 83.9
| 86.6
|--
! scope="row" rowspan="5" | Oxford
| Chia Man
| 85.9
| 117.4
| rowspan="5" | 1009
|-
| Philipp
| 92.1
| 121.4
|-
| Francesca
| 107/1
| 96.0
|-
| Arthur
| 110.6
| 121.4
|-
| Antoine
| 72.4
| 85.3
|}
=== 2018 ===