Color Schemes, the good the bad and the visible

[s.vannostrand at kodak.com]

Here's a contrary opinion to the thread on high visibility:

There is a top FAI pilot here in Texas named Paul Villarubia (hope he 
doesn't mind).  A few years ago the season started before he could get on 
his color coats.  He flew all season with an all white plane.  Paul is a 
winner or top finisher in almost all outings.  I was in Sportsman at the 
time and asked him how he could see the plane's attitude.  He said, "It's 
not a problem, I'm flying the plane, I know what it's doing". 
This was astounding to me since at that time I was totally dependent on my 
eyes to see what the plane was doing and make constant corrections. 
However, it's valuable to build skills to fly without depending on that 
tight eye-finger feedback loop.  My current Aries always gets comments 
about the color scheme, and I admit it is not that visible.  However, I've 
learned to fly with less dependence on 110% visual dependence.  This is an 
important skill when flying the first round at 10:00am in a contest (with 
the Sun in your eyes) and also is useful on flat light days.
  I'm no where near Paul's level on this, but flying without total visual 
dependence is a good thing.  High visibility color schemes are fine, but 
you might want to try to fly a poorly colored plane on a bad day just to 
exercise your mind.

Recently (at last year's Jetero contest) Paul was still flying practice 
rounds when all of us had packed up because it was too dark.  I couldn't 
believe he was still flying when the last of us left him for the local 
beer hall.  As we were leaving I noticed him taking off again.  simply 
amazing.

--Lance
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.f3a.us/pipermail/nsrca-discussion/attachments/20030305/e1be2987/attachment.html