Welcome to the 29th International Hand Launch Glider Festival!

April 27 and 28, 2024, Poway, CA

REGISTRATION IS OPEN!

The 29th anniversary and counting…

After two years of missing out on the International Hand Launch Glider Festival (IHLGF) in 2020 and 2021, we've come back strong with fun contests in 2022 and 2023, Last year's IHLGF was super fun, with pilots representing the USA, Germany, Philippines, Canada, China, and South Africa and an epic flyoff that led to a victory by Jon Finch. For the first time in quite a while, pilots from the USA took first, second, and third after the flyoffs.

This year, we have lots of fun planned. IHLGF 2024 is an official FAI F3K World Cup event so come join us as a stop on the tour! USA F3K 2023 Team alternate pilot Mengchen Li will be in attendance and serve as IHLGF Contest Director for the second year in a row, assisted in those duties by TPG's Gary Fogel. Chuck Norris, TPG's club president will continue as IHLGF Chairman. We've got a great team of amazing TPG volunteers that helps put on a solid event year in and year out for all to enjoy. The event will be scored using Tim Traver's excellent F3X Vault system. We'll be making use of Pandora, and hope to have multiple clockboards on the field so if you have Pandora systems remember to bring them along. We've got wireless speakers developed by TPG's Don Lochhead to help with sound. No guarantees but the typical “out of bounds Poway Jungle” might reappear by late April. As is tradition for IHLGF, preliminary scores will carry over into the flyoffs. The scores brought into the flyoffs do provide an advantage for the high point guys, but there haven't been many top preliminary pilots that ended up surviving the flyoffs in 1st place. Leads are seldom insurmountable, and contest wins starting from 5th, 6th and 9th place in the prelims can happen more often than not.

We are happy to welcome the Hampton Inn & Suites Poway as a sponsor through their special pricing for the International! Click the link to start your discounted reservation, or use the code 'TPG' when making arrangements by phone.

The field will be open for practice on Thursday. Friday is when a lot of pilots arrive and start tuning their gliders and warming up their launches. There will no-doubt be a lively few hours of all-ups to test your models and skills ahead of the main event. Saturday we hope to fly 8 rounds of prelims. Sunday should likely have 4 more rounds of prelims followed by 4 flyoff rounds to crown a champion.

All that flying is sure to make for some hungry pilots. Meals will be catered at the field again this year. Dinners will be available by prepay for Friday and Saturday night. As is TPG standard, Friday night will be Mexican food taco night, and Saturday night will be pizza night, cooked right on the field and sponsored kindly by Purple Air (Thank you Adrian!). Lunch both days will be catered by Subway so expect those large party sized submarines with chips, drinks and cookies. Lunches are included with event registration. Dinners can be purchased separately with registration. As usual we'll also have some t-shirts and other swag available for purchase – more on that will be announced here and via the RCgroups thread and available as line items during your event registration in F3X Vault. One new thing this year is that we are asking all pilots to pay for registration upon completing the registration process. This helps us tremendously with head count going into the event and avoids the additional hassle of tracking you down at the event for payment. You know who you are!

Lastly, leave some room in your trunk or sport tube to bring home some goodies! We take pride in an amazing collection of sponsors who take the time and effort to donate items for our IHLGF auction with a large portion of those proceeds donated by TPG to help support the USA F3K team annually. We're planning yet another large donation to the USA F3K team, and the club remains unsurpassed in our contributions and it's all because of you, our sponsors, and Team TPG in support of IHLGF! So make your plans now to come fly with us at Poway, help support the USA F3K team and have fun!

Will an even larger than usual German contingent return to reassert their position at the top? Will we have additional competitors from China? Will we see a hopeful return of Brazilian Storm? Will Jon Finch know to play it conservative in the flyoffs again? Come to IHLGF 2024 and find out!

See you soon,

TPG IHLGF Committee