Launch Report – February 26-27, 2005

Winter launches in North Carolina are always iffy affairs. On any given weekend, you could get weather like Saturday, that brings out a lot of people to have a lot of fun in great weather conditions, OR you could have a day like Sunday, which was scarcely tolerable.

We saw essentially no wind on Saturday and beautiful clear skies. There was a lot of standing water on the field, and long walks could seldom be made in a straight line. Several rockets took short swims, including one of David Cox’s. Let me insert a motor use summary here:

Sixty-four flights on a short February Saturday is a lot of flights, and apparently a lot of plans are being made for future action at Whitakers, because Ken Allen reports a lot of business on Saturday.

Certifications were the most exciting events of the day! Evan Daniel made a perfect Level 1 cert flight on a very stout rocket called the Blue Moon. This rocket is clearly designed to serve double duty as a Level 2 rocket, and to prepare for that flight, Evan made his L1 flight with an altimeter and 2-stage recovery! Very nicely done.

Ken Stroud passed his L2 written exam and loaded up his Cert 2 with a J90W and headed out to the pads around 5:45 PM. After a huge struggle with the difficult C-slot geometry and 4 balky igniters, the flight was finally scrubbed when the waiver expired at 6:00. I’m sure that Ken will be back next month.

The Nance family came up from Lumberton and Sarah and Gary made a lot of low-power flights. Several other new (or relatively new) names appeared on a lot of different flight cards: Reed Goodwin-Johansson was very busy, as were John and Nick Hobson, and Megan, Alex, and Casey Stocking.

Jim Varrone made the trip from Wilmington for the first time in quite a few months and made up for lost time, flying 5 rockets in the H through J range. Jim experienced a rather rare failure of a Cesaroni motor that scorched one of his rockets, but enjoyed an otherwise excellent success rate.

David Cox put on a fine show with his Magnum ground-starting 1 J90W and 2 H210R’s for a very exciting flight. Dave Morey flew the Sinister 29 on another batch of air-started motors for a real crowd-pleaser. The flight card for this flight has a hilarious “pictogram” in the little box marked ‘launch conditions and flight observations’(see bottom of page). 

Tim Watts, from Rockingham, had the monster flight of the weekend, putting his EXCEL plus up on a K550W.

Some high clouds moved in on Sunday with a cold, wet, 10 MPH breeze blowing directly towards the hellish briar-swamps behind the church. Enthusiasm for high altitude flights (and long recovery walks) was draining out of the EX crowd as fast as the cold, clammy wind was sucking the heat out of our bodies.

Blaine Jeffreys and Mike McBurnett combined forces for a fine flight of Blaine’s Democracy, Whisky, Sexy on one of Mike’s blue formulas. Alan Whitmore flew the Smooth Green Snake on a 38mm full I motor made from the Black Velvet formula (6916 feet), Mark Lloyd had a minor over-pressure incident with his Magnum and a 3-grain 76mm K motor using the 75:5 formula, and Ed Rowe flew the Maniac on a fuchsia, sparky M load that was very flashy.

Doyle Elkin made the trip from Wilmington to fly some sugar motors and flew a pair of unnamed rockets on some very stout G or H motors in PVC cases. Unfortunately, the electronics malfunctioned in one flight and the forward bulkhead popped out on the other one, but Doyle seems to have the right mind-set for EX and looked at both flights as “educational experiences”. We hope to see you back again soon.

Alan Whitmore, Prefect, Tripoli East NC