The scores for the Freestyle rounds are now posted below, along with the updated totals and standings.

An update on Naruke's landing incident in the Free round... turns out the start officer didn't realize Naruke and Mike Caglia were on the same frequency! Mike was instructed to turn on and start his engine, essentially shooting Naruke down.

Earlier in the day you may have found yourself locked out of the DA site. We occasionally hit our bandwith limit as set by the ISP. We'll have it bumped up even more to cover the expected weekend interest. The traffic on the site has grown tremendously with each year. We're seeing about 8 to 10 times the activity on the site that we did with our first TOC coverage in 1998.

Thursday, October 19th, 8:15 p.m.

Thursday is done, and what a day it was! The Known round was rather uneventful. Chip Hyde flew a nearly flawless sequence and won the round, placing him in second ahead of Quique (not counting the Freestyle). Stefan Fink's bad luck continued in the Known with a deadstick early on, possibly from a fuel delivery problem or a lean mixture setting.

The Freestyle... where to begin? You'll remember yesterday we remarked how the Frees were very aggressive, especially for so early in the contest. Well today, we saw a bit of everything... from the spectacular to the unfortunate, to just plain strange. All told, the last flight was shortly AFTER sunset, and the scores for the round were not available as of this writing. We should have them later tonight.

Giichi Naruke flew a very graceful free, but experienced a radio hit as he crossed the threshold on landing. The G-202 hit the runway hard, tearing out one gear leg and breaking the prop. It all appears to be repairable and we expect to see him ready to go again tomorrow.

Jason Shulman then got the crowd going will a solid, entertaining Free, certainly one of the best of the round.

Then it was Sebastiano Silvestri's turn at the free. From years past, Sebastiano's Frees have always included a very pretty, but very low, slow knife-edge pass. Today, however, he found trouble. As he approached slow in knife-edge he tried to throttle up to control the low altitude of the fly-by. Unfortunately the 140cc King didn't respond and the G-202's wingtip hit the dirt, cartwheeling the airplane to a broken heap nearly at Sebastiano's feet. The plane is a total loss. As this G-202 was already his backup (he lost his primary in practice), Mike McConville offered Sebastiano his backup FC Extra 330 to fly tomorrow.

Stefan Fink made TOC history by flying to the music of a live band! The band, "Ethan Riley and the Boys" set up at the far east end of the spectator grass with more than enough amps to be heard around the field. While their music was good, there appeared to be a serious mis-communication between Fink and the band. Fink flew for almost 10 minutes, much of it circling over the west end of the field while the band played. The rest of his flight was very tame passes back and forth, only occasionally with smoke. He eventually dead-sticked and landed, but the band continued to play... and play... and play. Finally someone ran down to their end to stop them so the round could continue.

Later it was Kirk Gray who, like Lakin yesterday, brought a blender a bit too low and got into the trees. Lakin got out of his brush with the bushes, but Kirk didn't. The Cap settled into the tree tops and dissappeared from view. A large group of helpers ventured out into the thick brush to help Kirk find and retrieve the plane. It was Sean McMurtry and Mark Leseberg who climbed the tree to bring the Cap down undamaged.

The pause in the flying while Kirk's plane was retrieved left the last two pilots, Goldsmith and Neel, to fly at sunset. Gerald Neel obviously wasn't impressed with Lakin's or Gray's experience in the tree tops so he went out and did it too! He was very fortunate in that the big Staudacher mushed through the tree tops and came into the clearing just north of the runway. He was then able to get the nose up and recover, finishing the rest of his Free without further incident. The left stab half suffered some damage from the trees but it looks to be repairable.

We'll have more, including lots of photos and the day's final scores later tonight.

Thursday, October 19th, 1:00 p.m.

Round 1 for today, the Unknown, is complete. Scores are posted below. Several pilots changed positions since last night and there are some close battles brewing in the middle of the pack.

The preliminary rounds conclude tomorrow with only the top 14 pilots advancing to Saturday's semi-finals. After Saturday, the field will be cut down with the top 7 pilots advancing to the Sunday Finals. One of the items cut from this years TOC budget is the Saturday night awards banquet. It is expected that awards for 21st thru 8th positions will be awarded here at the field after Saturday's flying.

The Known Round is being demonstrated by Warren Thomas now. We'll make an update when those scores are available later this afternoon.