Paul Smith:
It was a really nice day for a launch, and I wish I could have stayed longer. It was sunny and reasonably warm, and the winds were low. Winds aloft were almost absent, at least early in the day - some rockets that must have gone well over 1000' still came down right in the area around the pads, and few drifted very far.
I started off the day with a CHAD-staged Broadsword flight, D12-0/E9-6. The Broadsword also went up later on an E18-4. I now have 27 flights on that rocket.
My Initiator went up on an F25-6 (20th flight), and that Neubauer Mercury Redstone flew on an E30-4 (7th flight). The Mark II.6 (2.6" upscaled Astron Mark II) flew to about 1800 feet on an F32-5 (12th flight). Finally, my now beaten-up-but-still-flying Archer flew twice on G64-4 motors (26th and 27th flights).
All of my flights yesterday were completely nominal, except for a fast descent of the Initiator (parachute caught a bit in the nose cone). The first two flights of the day were not nearly as successful, though. A few folks whose names I don't know had some problems with apparently defective motors. The first flight I saw, on a 24mm SU motor (not sure which one) kicked the nozzle and dumped the unburned propellant onto the ground. The rocket kicked up to the top of the launch rod and hung there. The second rocket of the day had a spectacular forward closure burn-through on a G64 - ejected the upper half just a few feet above the rod, and then spun in circles in the air a few feet up, spitting flame out the front end. The poor guy had to stomp on the rocket to put the (small) fire out. When he opened it up, he found that the front part of the forward closure (the part that the ejection charge snaps onto) had burned completely off.
Paul Smith
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The weather for a February launch couldn't have been better. It was warm, there wasn't a cloud in the sky, and it was almost dead calm.
My first flight was with a three stage Farside X that flew with a BlackSky Altimeter. The altimeter had been configured to capture the flight data. The B6 in the first stage was just enough to get the rocket off the pad. It weather cocked a little bit, but otherwise it was a picture perfect flight. The resulting flight data from the altimeter was predictable, but very interesting none the less.
I would have liked to have taken advantage of the calm wind and flown large rockets, but the biggest motor I had left was a G64. I used the G64 in my LOC Hi-Tech for a good flight and then settled for launched a hand full of smaller rockets.
One notable flight was a large rocket flown by Norm Heyen on a K550. He used an altimeter for dual deployment and was expecting to reach an altitude of about five thousand feet. He accidentally wired the altimeter backwards causing the main parachute instead of the drogue to be deploy at apogee. On most days the rocket would have been blown far from the launch site, but the winds were so calm that the rocket came straight down and landed about fifty yards south of the pad it was launched from.
