Fun Flight Stats / Potential Penalties

Though the desire to run a perfect error-free race is always the goal, the 'Hearts' had a couple of potential points that are under review for penalties. Most penalties are assessed as addition to the time to run a race leg thereby decreasing the team's chances of winning a leg prize.

The race officials are confirming the mechanic 'sign-off' for the rudder repair in New Mexico. The team is not concerned since the mechanic released the plane and obviously it flew without further incident so we don't anticipate any penalty for use of unapproved equipment. The second concern is that the Bad Elf tracking system apparently quit tracking the flight data after the first day's leg. The team may have back-up Foreflight data which matches the 'Spot' satellite tracking. We expect that the race folks will have enough back-up data from other sources to confirm that the team did not alter or interact with the data recorder in any material way to affect the outcome of the race. 

The team expects to RECEIVE a time penalty for apparently 'not' announcing a radio call upon lift-off out of Americus, Georgia on the last day. Though the ladies recall hearing other teams launching and thought they WERE broadcasting their departure, apparently the radio was only on monitor mode since ATC has no recordings of the team's radio calls out of Americus. Radio calls are an important part of the safety briefings before the race so, though disappointing to not run a perfect error-free race, this is a perfectly understandable time penalty.  

As for flight stats, here are a few to digest. Though the official race course is just a smidge over 2720 miles, by the time you fly in and around for timing fly-bys the team actually logged over 2968 miles during over 19 hours of flying. Remember the team also flew some 2200 miles to get to the start line for the race, and will fly back around 1000 miles to return to home base. An amazing 6100+ mile air adventure, (about a quarter distance around the earth ) in a little less than 2 weeks - WHEW!!