Simplicity itself; the competition is formatted to suit the glider.

Once the launch-lines have been deployed and the gliders attached to the business ends, the pilots stand adjacent to each other, almost shoulder to shoulder in a line across the airfield.

The time-keeper calls the count-down to launch. At 'zero,' the pilots release their gliders simultaneously. The gliders climb away, wing-tip to wing-tip. People talk about the point of no return, this is the point of no distraction. One slip here and the whole field can fall, so of course, in keeping with the light-hearted nature of this competition, everyone tries to distract everyone else.

There are two tasks involved with each heat: land exactly on the five minute call and land exactly in the centre of the landing target. You can eat up the intervening five minutes how-ever you want. Most competitors go thermalling for a while. At the four minute call, all the gliders are back overhead, high and hovering still, like hawks. Then at the forty-five seconds to run call, all hell breaks loose. The gliders, which had been parked at 200 feet, loop and spin and spiral and scream their way back down. At 50 feet they arrest their descent and go back into hawk mode, waiting. With twenty seconds to run, the air around the landing marker becomes very crowded and very busy. With five seconds to run, there's a carpet of purple floating two feet above the target. Exactly on the five minute call, that carpet crumples into a single point: the target marker, altitude=zero.

Maximum fun.

The point scoring system has been weighted towards the time aloft. A pilot landing directly on the target at the four minute call will score less points than a pilot landing 3 metres shy of the target at four minutes, twenty seconds.