posted Oct 20th, 2022 - Day by day, and now hour by hour, Round 1 of the FAI Outdoor World Meet 2022 is coming closer. The meet briefing, with opening ceremony and competition draw, is scheduled for 17.30 pm at Skydive Arizona. As usual, there will be a lot of action on the ground as soon as the competition draw is released, and the NSL News will record as much of it as possible.

There is also great news coming from the French delegation. It was already encouraging that national coach Mathieu Bernier eventually decided with the French federation to sanction an 8-way team for the world meet and arrived with a larger delegation than expected after the world meet last year.

The latest news was almost even more exciting, as French FAI Judge Thierry Courtin presented a photo of the Fun Flag that was taken today at Skydive Arizona. There has not been much news related to the Fun Flag, who had apparently suffered from the corona virus crisis, as well.

The photo is showing three members of the French 4-way Open Class team, Alban Rumolo, David Ricard and Mathieu Quizy, who are proudly presenting the Fun Flag. The location at Skydive Arizona is unknown, and the NSL News had launched an investigation to collect more information.

Teams 4-way Open	Country	Jump Order	Power Ranking
4Astrophe	CA	1	14
Airbus Oceanside Illertissen	DE	2	5
Tina & The Dinosaurs	NZ	3	19
Sky4Four	PL	4	14
Adventure Flyers	PY	5	17
Equinox	LT	6	19
HF Flying Circus	CZ	7	9
HSV Red Bull Aerodynamix	AT	8	17
Echochamber Oceanside	SE	9	5
Agera FS 2022	NO	10	9
La Playa	GT	11	19
Chimera	UK	12	5
Sequenz	DK	13	14
INIT-Y	BR	14	9
Ripper	AU	15	9
Out of the Blue	NL	16	9
Papea Masculino	ES	17	5
France 4-way Open	FR	18	2
Qatar Tigers	QA	19	2
Arizona Airspeed	US	20	1
NMP-PCH Hayabusa	BE	21	2

One of the steps of the countdown to Round 1 is the definition of the jump order for the participating teams. Meet Director Randy Connell completed his list yesterday, which is following the usual FAI/ISC procedure. The starting order for Round 1 is the reversed ranking order of the last world meet.

It is a little bit trickier this year, as the number of participating countries in 4-way Open has grown from nine teams at the FAI Tanay Mondial 2020 to 21 national teams who are ready to start the first round tomorrow morning.

It was not difficult to define the order in 8-way, where only five teams are registered. Germany (Airbus 8) and Great Britain (MicroClim8) did not compete in Russia. However, France (Mojo Annecy-Clermont) may still share the two 8-way slots in the Twin Otter with XP8, as the Qatar Falcons placed 4th last year.

The four 4-way Women teams will probably all share a Twin Otter load together, and France will exit last as the highest ranked team at the last world meet, and in the absence of the Russian world champions, Bubbles.

The jump order in 4-way Open differs from the NSL Power Rankings, which are created by the most current results at any competitions. The FAI/ISC order of the Top 10 could not even be completed, as only seven of the countries at the last world meet have their current national teams at Skydive Arizona.

NMP PCH HayaBusa are still the reigning world champions in 4-way Open, and they will be the last team exiting the jump plane. It is still unknown at this point how the 21 teams will share the Twin Otter loads, even though the starting order is ready for Round 1. The number of 21 registered teams does not fit perfectly to the 4-team loading capacity of a Twin Otter. Randy Connell still has some decisions to make before the opening ceremony. It will become easier once the first day of competition is over. The rankings after the competition rounds of the first day usually define a new starting order according to the leaderboard rankings.