A Near Perfect Performance

First Flight Down Under

After the long night we arrived here this morning at 6 and they drew our name out of the hat to fly first.  We got out to the field and set up and flew our 10 minutes of scrutineering and passed that.  Then we landed and prepared for the mission.  They held us for nearly an hour because of low cloud ceilings.  After the clouds burned off we were cleared to take off.  We got out into the search area as fast as we could and we found "Outback Joe" within 10 minutes of takeoff.  We then prepared for the drop.  Unfortunately, we did have an unscheduled drop... not where we wanted to.  We have not been told how close we were but the preliminary report is we were outside the 100 meter boundary for a complete mission.  We came back to the airfield after that and landed the aircraft safely.  We stand as the only team who has ever sent the aircraft out, identified Joe, dropped a bottle, and returned safely to the airfield.  We are happy with our performance and it has been an unbelievable experience.  We will find out our actual performance and placing later this afternoon possibly or tomorrow.  We will  update as soon as we know how we place.

Cheers