May 7, 2016 Launch Report
Saturday was a very pretty day, although the breeze picked up mid-morning and never really settled back down (although there were some brief periods of relative calm). There was a nice turnout, including Harry Spears (aka The Motorman) along with Dan DeHart and Chris Sumpter, all up from the Houston area.

Recovery was a mixed bag because of the wind, and interestingly the length of the recovery walk was only weakly correlated with the height of the flight: some high fliers recovered nearby while some relatively low flights caught the wrong breeze and drifted quite a ways. Of course, John Hawkins' Alien on an A8-3 didn't drift very far at all after reaching its apogee of approximately 18 feet.

There were three Green Gorilla motors, and all of them were hard to light, one especially so. It sat on the pad huffing and puffing for what seemed like an eternity, but it finally got down to business and got off the pad cleanly. Dan DeHart broke out an experimental K870 Amarillo Blue that prompted advance fire-fighting preparations, but those preparations turned out to be completely unnecessary as it lit relatively easily and roared off the pad for a nice flight.

There were two L1 certification attempts, both successful. Gordon Bain flew his Nike-Red (a Mad Cow Nike Smoke airframe and fins, but a normal ogive nosecone) on a CTI H225. Heavy rocket, flew to about 800 ft, and recovered with motor ejection. Sofia Catalan of Longhorn Rocketry Association came out and made quite a statement, flying her scratch-built Spacecat 02 on a CTI I540 with dual deployment using a Stratologger. It flew to about 2500 ft and recovery was beautiful and perfect, landing a couple hundred feet away from the flight line. She then dropped the mic and walked away :-)

The Three Rocketeers TARC team was out to get a few final practice flights in with their egg lofter, trying to dial everything in perfectly for this weekends TARC national contest in the Washington DC area. You can probably keep track of their efforts on the NAR website. Or maybe they'll post something to the group telling us how they're doing.

Two people used the new JollyLogic Chute Release gadgets for dual deployment without any pyro devices. Those flights worked flawlessly, and the units look pretty nice, especially if you're trying to employ dual deployment on a rocket originally built for simple motor ejection.

Thanks once again to Jim and Gloria Jarvis for all of the hard work they do to prepare these launches. Gloria even mowed the launch areas for us this time out. And thanks to everybody else who helped with setup and teardown, and thanks again to Harry for coming out to sell us motors and support the hobby. I enjoyed seeing everybody again after my hiatus, and look forward to seeing everybody again in June.

Mark

Motor statistics:

By impulse
By manufacturer
Flights







1/8A 0
Aerotech 13
31
1/4A 0
Apogee 0

�A 0
AMW 3

A 3
CTI 5

B 0
Estes 9

C 1
Loki 0

D 2
Quest 0

E 5
RoadRunner 0

F 6
EX 1

G 3
Total 31

H 2




I 5




J 1




K 3




L 0




M 0




N 0




Total 31