When the rumours of an imminant release started coming in to the Pie offices, we obviously needed to get an up-close-and-personal look at it so we went down to the NovaX HQ in Innsbruck. Yes, right next to Switzerland, the home of good watches, big mountains and honorable losers who never complain when they discover that their top comp pilots are indeed the best in the world, but sadly only in booming alpine conditions or scorching flatlands, where searching for thermals involves flying straight out from takeoff and circling in anything less than a 3-up is considered a waste of time. OK, so it's not Austria, but it needed to be said, and who knows anything interesting about Austria? So.... we set up a hard-to-get interview with Hands Pampas and were well chuffed.
When we arrived at the offices and warehouse, there was clearly an argument going on upstairs, and we could just hear the end of it. I definitely heard someone shout, "...not with those fucking wankers, and that's the end of it", and then what sounded like an office door slamming shut. We were all ready to be shown a blinding array of statistics to back up a presumed increase of 0.8 in glide, but would you believe it, Hands was unavailable again and they sent some marketing tosser to talk to us instead. Well, beggars can't be choosers, so we said, "Please talk to us, Mr Marketing Tosser, we're begging you". Luckily he did.
"Ve've been innovating ziss vinter", he began with a slight accent, "but first let me ask you zomezink. Put yourself in zee pozition of a potential buyer, right, you're lookink vor a good walue 1-2 vrom a top manufacturer, vizz top performance and vithout a hefty price tag. Vat do you buy?".
The embarrasing silence continued as he simply stared at us. He obviously really wanted us to answer and before we could stop ourselves we just blurted out the truth. "Err, a two year old Mamboo?", we said. And then he hit us with it.
"Exactly, meine Freunde's", he said, "A 2 year old Mamboo, and zat's vot ve've been vorking on. Ve have developed special manufacturing techniques to give zee vings a 2 year old look, but still using brand new materials. Zey really look like vings viz 50-100 hours on zem and yet have have zat "well cared for & not left out in the sun" appearance. Zee hardest part haz been zee insertion of zee sand and zee dust in zee seams, but ve've cracked zat now. They're brand new and people know that, it's just like zem 501 jeans, you know?".
"What?. Nah, that's bollocks", we thought, and just as we were about to launch into a tirade of abuse based on the fact that we simply didn't believe him, he invited us to have a look around the test production-line they'd set up, and sure as eggs come from chickens, they really were making 2-year old wings. Straight off the production line. Our journalistic noses were twitching though, everything just didn't add up. Something simply didn't smell right. Now, we're not manufacturers, but you don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand a production line. You take lots of individual pieces, join them together in a very clever way and bingo, a product. Now there we were at at the start of the production line, but where were all the components? We could see hundreds of metres of new line, but where was the rest? Where were the rolls of material for example? All we could see were pieces of packaging material lying around on the floor, as if boxes had been opened here. There were a few remnants of DHL packing tape & parts of FedEx labels lying about. You could almost make out details on some of them, "...ttoo S, red, UK". No. Surely not. They wouldn't. Not NovaX. Mind you we thought, we've heard rumours that certain other manufacturers have been doing it for years, and it would explain the large delays between announcement and release that have been occuring here at NovaX recently.
"So", we said, adopting a casual stance, "What about the Ta-Two replacement, the Are-A, why have you only released one size?". You had to look closely, but you could actually see the sweat on his forehead freezing before your very eyes. Bingo. He smoothly replied with remarks about Monaco being shut and not enough places to test in Europe and the DHV being strict with the weather conditions and the winter being really wierd this year and global warming being an overiding factor and that there aren't enough months ending in the letter S, etc, but we knew we were onto something, we just knew it. We knew, and he knew that we knew, and we knew that he knew that we knew. Oh yes, it was staring time again, and this time we weren't going to come second.
After a few moments of silence he lead us over to a small room at the end of the offices and asked us to step inside. He closed the door behind us and dropped the blinds. He looked us all straight in the eye, one by one, and said, "None of this goes outside this room right", startling us with his perfect english.
As we nodded our heads, he began, "Well, let me tell you something about the aerofoil designs that sit on top of these new 3-riser, reduced line wings that are hitting the market these days"
Pie in the Sky
Funnier than the 1494 "Leonardo da Vinci Training Hill" videos
Funnier than the 1494 "Leonardo da Vinci Training Hill" videos