World-champion model gliders: Hawke’s Bay trio beat the best in Bulgaria, despite Ukraine war worries

Kevin Botherway launches a glider in Bulgaria.

Kevin Botherway will have to source planes from another nation when he seeks a third consecutive world title in two years’ time.

Botherway, along with fellow Hawke’s Bay pilots Joe Wurts and Andrew Hiscock, has just got back from Bulgaria, where they claimed the gold medal at the F5J model Gliders Electric Soaring World Championships.

Hawke’s Bay is a bit of a radio-controlled soaring hotbed, in case you didn’t know.

Botherway and Wurts were also in the three-man New Zealand team that won the 2019 title. Covid put paid to the 2021 championships, and now Botherway and company are plotting the path to a three-peat in Argentina in 2025.

The only problem is: their gliders come from Ukraine.

“Luckily, we had enough models to carry us through from 2019 to now,” Botherway said.

Wurts, an aeronautical engineer, designs the planes, which are then built in Ukraine.

Or were.

With “bullet holes through the moulds”, that production line is in recess for the foreseeable future.

“The moulds still exist but, as you know, Ukraine is in a war, so we’ve got a bit of a dilemma going forward,” said Botherway.

The gliders cost about $5000 each, and Botherway, Wurts and Hiscock took five apiece to Bulgaria.

The victorious New Zealand pilots and support staff celebrate their win.

Three weeks acclimatising to the European summer was one challenge, as were winds of up to 40 knots.

Your average glider weighs 1600 grams, but those winds required ballasts that basically doubled the weight.

“There’s no doubt the Kiwis excelled in that part of it. The models we put up were very powerful, very strong,” said Botherway.

About 160 competitors took part in the pre-world champs tournament, before 90 assembled for the event proper.

Croatia, Germany, Slovakia and France were the big competition for a championships in which Botherway says “we expected to do mediocre”.

The end result was anything but, as Botherway and Wurts soared to victory again.

The pair, along with Hiscock, train from a humble base at Haumoana and take huge pride in flying the New Zealand flag so far afield.

For the uninitiated, the nuts and bolts of this sport are this: a motor is used, for 30 seconds, to get the glider airborne, with the object to then fly it unassisted for 10 minutes. A flight is only as good as its pinpoint landing, though, with those measured to the millimetre.

A trio of Hawke's Bay pilots took the spoils at the world electric gliding championships. Photo / Supplied

Being a seasoned campaigner certainly helps.

“The art of catching the thermal is the big thing,” Botherway said.

“You can feel them, and then train your body to pick up even a very slight wind change. As you become more experienced, there is an art of feeling what’s going on in the air and what we call ‘ground science’.

“You might see a flag in the distance blowing in one direction - or a vector - and you know pretty well there should be a thermal there. But sometimes there’s not.”

It’s then up to the telemetry in the glider to show how long it flew for, at what altitude and how well it landed.

“That’s the good thing about soaring. There’s no judging or anything - it’s purely numbers,” said Botherway.

“It’s all on the stopwatch and all on the digital.”