Post flood launch, B6-4 Field, 4-13-25

 We had some fairly serious flooding the previous week, but Sunday the 13 was actually our third straight day without deluge.  Saturday was actually the better day of the weekend, at least from a wind standpoint, but it was also the choice day for softball, and I'm not comfortable flying with a game going on.  Sunday was breezier, but there were no games scheduled.  There was a practice going on when we came home from dinner, but that was done by the time I arrived at the field a little after two.  Two girls arrived on scooters toting bats right after I set up, but I could see that the mud and lack of interest would mean they would be gone in less than 30 minutes.  I was set up in deep left, while they were at home plate, so with a whole field between us I decided to go ahead with my launch.

I'm working my way through the rockets that haven't seen airtime since before 2020.  Today's batch was a mix of those that were with me last month, some new ones, and some recently rediscovered ones.  The first flight would be a perfect example of the rediscovered ones.  I threw Oscar the Grouch together the night before a competition in 2015.  Everything about him was garbage and after his competition flights, he pretty much returned to the trash can.  I recently found him while cleaning the shop and almost threw him out before I decided he was worth having around as a wind test bird.  That's how he came to be first on the pad today.

The original cone is no longer with us, but I found an Alpha cone in my stash that seemed light enough to fit the bill.  Oscar was loaded with an A10-3T, which means I not only tested the wind, I pretty much overflew the field.  This was a great flight, especially considering the conditions.  Oscar left the pad with a definite lean toward the school behind me.  Altitude was excellent, topping out at 363' and he was still short of apogee when the ejection charge fired.  This was when things got dicey.  The streamer streamed and Oscar began racing back across the field.  He was by me in a blink and at first looked like he might catch the tree at the edge of the field, then the wires, then the road.  In the end it was the road.  He dropped onto US 27 and I began my recovery hike while I watched traffic buzzing by.  Actually, I was lucky.  Traffic was light, probably because a good portion of town was home watching The Masters.  I found him dead in the middle of the turn lane, well out of the tire marks.  I had to wait for two cars to pass in the fast lane, then another one after I made the pickup, but Oscar was no worse for wear after his adventure.

As much as I'd like for there to be more to show of this flight, this is all of it.  I checked every frame of the video looking for any trace of Oscar.  My camera skills continue to decline.  I was probably tracking another floater.

Flight #2 would stay with the themes of flight #1.  Shop scraps used in construction - check.  Wildly overflew the field - check.  I threw this together just to see if I could get one of the spin stabilized rockets to work or at least show a noticeable spin as it left the pad.  The Estes Spin Fin was a huge disappointment.  The first flight of the Canaroc Tornado Two was worse.  It left the pad and was upside down before it was five feet above the rod, then crashed to the field still under power.  It went home, had its nose cone scavenged for another project, and came perilously close to the trash bag during my recent shop clean up.  Actually, the only thing that saved it was finding one of my old Mach 10 marker cones with WAY too much weight added.  They seemed to be the perfect match.

This flight would be on an A8-3.  Again, WAY too much power for the field, but considering that the T2 was born of junk and was almost garbage, I didn't get too twisted about the idea of losing it.  The heavier nose cone made a huge difference in the stability, but I can't honestly say anything about the flight suggested spin stabilization.  It was gone before I knew it, just like the Spin Fin.  The Spin Fin would have also flown on an A8-3, but I don't remember this kind of altitude.  The T2 left the pad on the same path that Oscar had followed, behind me and out over the school.  I had loaded the T2 with a large crepe paper streamer, so I figured it would make spotting the rocket a lot easier.  I heard the ejection, saw the smoke, and was able to track the T2 back across the parking lot, Woodfill Avenue and left field, all the while waiting for the streamer to stream.  As it got closer, I could see the streamer wadded up and thrashing wildly off of the shock cord.  As it passed over top of me, I realized that only the stub of the streamer was left.  I turned and scanned the skies for the rest but saw nothing.  The T2 landed in short left field, a mere 20' from the pad.  The nose cone was leading the way toward the field and buried itself in the muck.  Next will be some high visibility paint.  And maybe a B6-6.

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I've been messing with more gliders lately, because I'm the kind of guy who likes that kind of torture.  But seriously, folks, even though I've demonstrated virtually no clue as to how to build and fly a successful glider, I've managed to make a number of them that worked as advertised over the years.  Yep, I can't explain it, but I have a golden touch.  Or at least aluminum.  Flight #3 on the day would be one of the NAR Jet Freak gliders that I've built over the years.  My first one was thrown together in 2017 out of scraps from the shop.  I didn't think a whole lot of it, but I flew it at B6-4 Field on an A8-3 and after an initial shudder, it sailed off into the neighborhood, pretty as a picture.  It cleared the telephone pole up by the school by a hundred feet or more.  Truly an inspiring sight.  Never saw it again.  I was clearly a prodigy.  Today's victim, one of several strewn around my shop, was one that had been weighted specifically to fly in a circle using very tiny weights that I received in a long-ago eBay auction.  Having learned my A8-3 lesson, this flight would be on a 1.2A6-2.

The 1/2A was perfect for conditions on this day.  It was the first flight of the day not to overfly the field.  It began hooking to the left as soon as it cleared the rod and was out over deep center field when the ejection charge fired.  It looped and caught the wind, tried to fly into it, but began crab its way backward toward right field.  Finally, it caught the breeze right and began descending in a tight circle.  Great to watch, but with the limited amount of outfield space to work with, it looked like a softball complex landing was in the cards.

Then a miracle occurred.

The Jet Freak was looping, still high above the grass with the breeze blowing it sideways.  During the last loop, the last possible loop, it pitched up slightly and the bottom of the wing caught the breeze.  It pitched up and immediately made a nosedive into the right field muck.  The recovery was a sloppy pain, but I was glad to recover it at all.

I picked up the LOC/Precision Iris Mini on the cheap several years ago.  The Mini lineup was an oddly simple collection of 18mm birds all built on the same basic platform.  They built up nice enough, and fly fine, but I never really got into them.  Still, they're part of the fleet, and I hate seeing rockets on the spreadsheet that haven't flown in five or more years.  2015 was the last flight for the Iris, a flight that saw one of the fins crushed by a nose cone rebound.  This would be an A8-3 flight, once again overflying the field.

Yeah, needs some paint.  Still turned in an impressive flight.  I adjusted the rod to take the school out of the equation and was rewarded with a straight up, straight down flight.  Altitude was 232' and for a change I was able to keep most of the flight on the screen.  A 10' chute that I found was perfect for the recovery portion and brought things down about 20' from the pad.  That settles it.  Painting starts tomorrow.

Another long-suffering bird would wind up being flight #5, the Semroc Cherokee C.  It hadn't flown since 2015, for no other reason than it was MIA in one of my totes.  It turned up after my wife bought me LED lighting for the shop and I was able to see something more than shadows in there.  This was the rocket that inspired my fleet of Cherokees.  I have a BT-5 Cherokee A, a BT-20 Cherokee B, two Cherokee Ds and a BT-60 Cherokee E.  I've thought about ordering the BT-70 parts for the Cherokee F, but the scarcity of 29mm motors and the three hour drive time to fly it kinda sap my interest. 

The Cherokee C flight was almost a mirror of the Mini Iris, but I did a better job of keeping the Mini Iris in frame as I filmed.  It left the pad heading toward deep center, topped out at 262', and popped the chute while still heading up.  Recovery was just to the right of where the Iris landed.  If I could bottle this flight, I'd buy it by the case.

I picked up the Estes AstroSat LSX for the nose cone after losing my original FRW Marauder.  Back then the nose cone was a tough find, being used in only the Estes Greyhawk and Interceptor II, neither of which were all that common.  My original came in a Designer's Special, but those were on the pricey side as well.  I eventually got bored and built the AstroSat with a different nose cone, but when the original nose cone became more common, I swapped one in.  This would be the first flight since 2015.

This was the lowlight flight of the day, but as you know, those usually make for an entertaining story.  This would be a B6-4 flight, because the AstroSat is kind of a pig and because I wouldn't be terribly hurt if I lost it.  No way to lose this one.  The AstroSat left the pad, well most of it, and flew to about 12 feet before crashing into the ground next to me.  Turned out that one of the plastic launch lugs had caught on something as it made its way up the rod.  The two pieces bonded.  Literally.  Ejection occurred as I stood there filming from ten feet away.  The blast deflector did a nice job.  The chute deployed but was not needed.  The snot-nosed third grader in me giggled at the three-foot trail of barf.  Postmortem of the flight showed that a fin had broken off along with the troublesome launch lug.  All pieces were found, and it should be repaired in time for the next scheduled flight in 2035.

The RDC V-Max came about by accident.  I always thought the nose cone was cool, but I never expected to actually see one.  Then one night back in my night shift days, one popped up as an eBay "Buy It Now", and I obeyed the command.  I approximated the fin pattern based on a catalog scan at YORF and here we are.  TITLE

The V-Max flight, an A8-3 for those keeping score, was perfect, heading toward center like the previous two flights and topping out at 292'.  I'd chosen a streamer for the flight, mostly because I hate the idea of losing this nose cone to a rogue breeze.  The streamer streamed it down to a left-center field landing, bouncing hard in the spring grass, but surviving without damage. 

 

Back when I restarted the hobby back in 2001, Custom Rockets were plentiful and cheap on the local shelves.  The Tristar was the first one I bought, one of the rockets I picked up for my nephews to fly at a family launch.  Genius nephew #2 pulled the chute out despite being told to leave it alone.  Then he wadded it back up and tried to stuff it back into the tube as it stood on a picnic table.  When it didn't fit he tried to whack it to get the nose cone back on.  Needless to say, it didn't fly that day but later became one of the first rockets I treed at B6-4 Field.  I actually built that one better than this one.

The Tristar flight was a new experience on the day.  Possibly because I reoriented the launch rod after it took the unscheduled flight with the AstroSat, the Tristar flight actually headed straight up off the pad.  This wouldn't have been an issue except that the breeze had shifted and was now coming from behind me.  The Tristar flight topped out at 287' and had it not been for the parawad parachute, it surely would have made it over the fence into the soccer complex.  As it was, the chute filled about 20' above the dirt and it landed hard on the infield at first.

Flight #9 would be half of everyone's favorite two-fer, the Estes Javelin.  One of my friends made the Javelin/Super Flea combo his first purchase in 1977, and I've always had a soft spot for them.  It was one of my early cloning projects and the Super Flea pretty much died on the B6-4 Field infield a couple of years back.  I was hoping for a better flight out of the Javelin, its first since 2017,

The 1/2A3-4T Javelin flight was much the same as the Tristar, straight off the pad, then followed the breeze away from the pad for an infield landing.  Altitude topped out at 317' and it used nose blow recovery.  It's nothing if not sturdy, and the failure to get the streamer out was what doomed the Super Flea when it nosed in.

To be honest, I was a little surprised that I got this far.  Flight #10 was supposed to be the Estes Screamer, but two igniter failures caused it to be replaced with the Estes Screamer, an eBay throw in that I refer to as the eBay Screamer to differentiate the fraternal twins.  This would be a 1/2A3-4T flight and being that the Screamer is just a step up from a Mosquito, would definitely be overflying the field.

The Screamer didn't disappoint.  It well and truly screamed off the pad to the 379' mark, straight up at first, then leaning away from me.  I had halted the launch for a minute to let the winds die down, something that I had to do several times on the day.  In this case the winds picked up as I pressed the go button.  The Screamer was in trouble from the start.  The ejection charge fired, annoying dogs as far away as Lexington, and the Screamer began falling while racing for the fence.  I'm no arithmetic major, but I could do the angles and tell that I had zero chance of recovering the rocket on my side of the fence.  It landed in short-right on the softball field, a prodigious drift.  I walked over and found a father and daughter in the batting cage, a structure built outside the actual field, which was locked.  In the past I've had some of the local kids watch the launches and fight each other for the chance to jump the fence for me, but I felt funny asking this girl to do me the same favor.  No need.  As I walked away, she jumped the fence and retrieved the rocket for me to lose another day.  Oh, to have young knees and ankles again.

As I mentioned earlier, I went through a boost glider phase several years ago, which resulted in many yards of balsa kindling.  One of the more surprisingly successful of those gliders was a clone of the AMROCS Wombat.  The Wombat appealed to me for the same reason the Jet Freak did.  It looked easy to build.  Imagine my surprise when it flew exactly as hoped.  It even had a built in turn during the glide phase.  The only problem was that the motor may have impacted one of the side fins as it ejected, and I was not able to find the missing piece.  No problem.  I went home that night and built another one.  That was in 2018.  This would be the first flight.

This is a strange situation.  I'm sure I filmed this flight, and the file numbers show that I did, but there's nothing to show for it.  I checked the recycle bin on the computer and the recently deleted folder on the phone.  Nothing.  You'll just have to trust me on this one.  1/2A6-2 flight, so no dangerous altitudes to speak of, but the Wombat left the pad heading for center field.  I lost it at first, but a father and daughter who were practicing soccer pointed it out to me.  It had looped over center then began fighting the breeze flying sideways toward right, trying to turn, but not getting it done.  It eventually dropped to the ground in a perfectly stable landing, once again making me look like the glider whisperer.  Your guess is as good as mine, but this design can officially be considered foolproof.

The final flight of the day would be the USR Stripper, the first flight since 2018 and the second on an A8-3.  Somewhere Jerry Irvine is furiously concocting a plague with my name on it.  I'm sure his vision for the Stripper was a fire-breathing C6-7 at the very least, and my two flights together haven't come close.  Then there's the paint job.  I went white with pink glitter nose cone and fins, just to keep to the stripper theme.  The Stripper came in a USR bundle with the Scout and Supersonic, both of which were lost on big motors on big fields.

 No drama with this girl.  She took to the pole like a pro and went off like a rocket.  She climbed to 382', danced around in the breeze for a second, then descended with damp dollar bills tucked into her streamer.  She finished the performance with a soft landing in the short center field grass.  I can see a bright future for this girl on the pole. Er, rod.  Nevermind.

By this time the winds were becoming more insistent, so I packed up and headed back to the car.  I'd like to say I see a flight day in the near future, but we seem to have had our spring weekend without rain.  We have a scheduled launch in the corn next weekend, but the weather reports from eight days out don't look promising.  Go figure.