The purpose of the Ozone Open in Chelan is to create a solid environment that enables learning, safety, competition, and allow newer competition pilots to flourish in a setting where all gliders are C class or lower.

This year the Ozone Open in Chelan, Washington had three tasks ranging from 71 km to 103 km long.

Every day starts with a mentoring session at launch, which this year included the support of, Ozone R&D pilot, Russ Ogden.

Nick Greece reports:

“Russ Ogden kicked off his American tour with a lecture to the Seattle free flight community surrounding what it takes to bring a paraglider from concept to certification including a deep dive into what certification actually means and what each test by the testing house determines.

Next stop was the Ozone Open where Matt Senior and Austin Cox (Northwest Paragliding) have been running a world class mentoring competition for the last three years. The Ozone Open is a has numerous classes that max out at C level wings. Mentoring is led daily by Ozone team pilot, Nick Greece, and this year Russ Ogden, Bill Belcourt, Galen Kirkpatrick, Anneka Herndon, Austin Cox, Julie Spiegler, and Owen Shoemaker provided deep insight into cross country flying and racing paragliders.

The weather this year was less than ideal but the comp still managed three great tasks including a final 102 km banger that saw 97 happy pilots land in goal!

On the non-flyable days multi-hour mentor sessions were held as well as a lecture from Professor Ogden on best techniques for flying 2-liner gliders.

Daily prizes were awarded every day to non mentor winners of the day in every category and many newcomers had personal bests! After three tasks the meet was won by long time Ozone pilot and US Team Member, Owen Shoemaker, Austin Cox was second and Professor Russell Ogden coming in third. All flying Photons.

In the Women’s class, Galen Kirkpatrick took the win flying her Photon, In second place was Lynsey Haynes followed by Blake Fletcher in third also flying Photon.

For full results:

https://airtribune.com/ozone-chelan-open-2023/results

Congrats to all the pilots and cheers from all the Ozone Team.