Launch Report, April 25-26, 2009

The final launch before the summer recess at Bayboro featured the finest weather yet in 2009! It was sunny, warm and dry all weekend, with a little wind on Saturday and even less wind on Sunday. The wheat was over a foot tall in our usual field, so we set up in the field behind the usual location for the porta-potty and had a great weekend. The wind was out of the WSW on Saturday and almost directly out of the west on Sunday, so we had the long axis of the field to recover in. As I recall, no rockets were lost either day.

The big excitement Saturday was the presence of two boy scout troops, troop 350 from Raleigh and troop 239 from Roxboro. There were about 25 to 30 boys on site, with adults, and the flying was just about non-stop until they ran out of rockets and motors. Troop 350 brought their own launch equipment, to augment the club’s low-power equipment, but there were still lines waiting to fly.

I’ll insert the motor use summary table here to give you a notion of the low-power activity on Saturday:

Motor	Sat	Sun	Both
A	11		11
B	52		52
C	29	1	30
D	10	3	13
E	4		4
F	1	1	2
G	2	10	12
H	3	5	8
I	2	1	3
J	2	1	3
Total	116	22	138

Just a reminder to those of you who have not read my reports before: Clustered or staged flights are classified by total installed impulse, so the flight of troop 350’s Super Delicious Mega-Fantastic Rocket, Sr. on 5 C6’s was classified in the F motor group.

Attendance was very disappointing, considering the perfect weather. However, we did have some visitors and a new family of flyers: The Colliers from Roanoke Rapids. F.E., Mike, and Tom Collier are all accomplished modelers and brought an impressive fleet of kits and scratch-built models, all impeccably finished. Stew McNabb was also there, and he brought a lot of kits we had seen before, and a few new ones: Unusually impressive were a model from Semroc that is a re-creation of a kit, called April Dancer, made by some company back in the ‘60s. The story that Stew told was that the proprietor of the rocket company was approached by the producers of a campy ‘60s television series called The Man From U.N.C.L.E, and asked to design a rocket to be used in the program for some nefarious purpose by the bad guys (a mysterious organization called THRUSH). When I got home from the launch and was going through the launch cards, the name April Dancer caught my eye again, and some little bit of memory started to nag at my mind, and I had to google the name. April Dancer was the name of the title character in a (very) short-lived spin-off program entitled The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. who was played by Mary Ann Mobley. Those of you who are male and were alive in the sixties, and lived anywhere near a television set, know why this stuck in my mind.

What with the vintage and repro kits brought out to the pads every few minutes by Stew McNabb and the Collier boys, this weekend was like one long history lesson for me. Thanks guys! Stew had a great flight with a rocket called the Estes Commuter, and he informed me that, in addition to kits, Estes used to sell plans for rockets that you could build with common nose cones, paper tubes and balsa sheets for the fins. Stew had finished this rocket in the livery of Ozark Airlines, and it was beautiful!

Tom Collier brought a Semroc V2 kit that was finished as perfectly as I have ever seen. This was a masterpiece! It flew on an Estes C6-5 and was recovered perfectly.

Saturday also saw the 41st flight of David Cox’s LOC Magnum, which flew on an Aerotech J415W, for yet another perfect flight.

Alan Whitmore flew the Astro*Mollusc II to 4260 feet with the surprisingly fast Aerotech J575FJ motor.

Late in the day on Saturday, when the boy scouts had either used up most of their motors or wrecked most of their rockets, they started collaborating with each other to produce multi-motor clusters for some increased excitement. I remember one rocket with a central C6 and 4 B6’s taped on between the fins, and a little later the same rocket appeared at the pads with a total of 5 C6’s somehow strapped on and wired in parallel. Neither rocket proved to be exactly stable once the button was pushed, but they put on a good show and generated a lot of excitement.

I would like to commend all of the boys in troop 350 for the best rocket names of the month. There are too many to single out, but almost every rocket that came to the pads had a new name for each flight and the names showed a lot of creativity and humor. I was looking forward to announcing the flights because I knew I would be amused by the rocket names.

Sunday started out a little windy, but the wind died down and became very calm by mid-afternoon. Zack Morey and Alan Whitmore flew the only low-power flights of the day, and Dave Morey had 2 clustered flights that were just spot-on. One was a Big Daddy cluster with 2 D11’s, 1 D12, and 2 E9’s, all lit simultaneously. A few hours later, Dave put the Sinister 24 up on 2 F39s at ignition, 2 E9’s one second later, and 3 D5’s came up to pressure at 4 seconds after launch. Today, everything worked perfectly and the Sinister 24 soared to 2100 feet. The winds were calm, the sky was clear blue, and all of the motors could be seen distinctly when they came on line – a truly masterful flight!

Kevin Murray brought a brand-new rocket ( a Wildman kit) that he named Lemon Lime to experiment with some G motors before attempting his level 1 flight. The rocket was beautifully finished and flew very well, but he had some problems with the delay grains in the short AT 38mm casing. Kevin was getting early ejection or, late in the day, no ejection, which caused a lot of damage.

Tommy Harrell flew his 4" Test Bed on an Aerotech I210R, which was his first I motor and used an altimeter for apogee deployment. Both the up and down portions of that flight were perfect.

John Hobson, Natalie Harrell, and Eddie Haith also had great flights on Sunday.

I was having some trouble with my knee this weekend, so I want to give a heart-felt thanks to David Cox for recovering my Astro*Mollusc on Saturday, and to David, Dave and Zack Morey, and Bill Boykin for helping to pack the trailer on Saturday and Sunday.

Alan Whitmore, Prefect, Tripoli East NC

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