Celebrating fall: the 80 degree autumn launch

 Yeah, one thing you can always count on around here is that you can never truly differentiate the seasons.  From snowy opening days of baseball season to t-shirt and shorts on Christmas, the weather is the one thing you can never count on, unless you count on not being able to count on it, then you're gold, Pony Boy.  On Sunday I wasn't so much gold as red, from both the heat and the sun.  Still, it was a great day to fly, and at least one of my flights was likely still being talked about Monday morning.  

"You wouldn't believe this flight one of the guys in our club made yesterday!"  

"Was it that Bill guy?"  

"Yeah!"  

"Say no more."

Okay, so maybe the person on the receiving end of this conversation didn't immediately have my name pop to mind.  Then again.......

I took fifteen rockets with me to fly with the Wright Stuff guys, all prepped and ready to go minus igniters.  Several made it out to the pad without igniters, so occasionally all my prep work is for naught anyway.  That's where my Altoids tins come in.  I carry one full of igniters and the other full of plugs.  So, once I went back to the car for my Altoids tins, the first rocket on the pad would be the Estes Star Wars Star Destroyer, last flown here at eRockets field in 2015.  The Star Destroyer was one of the rockets I'd spent the weekend shoring up for flight duties.  It had a myriad of problems, a bent tube, a cracked nose cone, an engine mount that had had the motor hook ripped out of it but was still securely glued to the plastic part that removes for display.  I don't display mine, so I replaced the probe tube with a BT-60 centering ring that is attached to the back of the structure with JB Weld.  The option to remove for display is no longer an option.  Fini.  Kaput.

Did either of you ever drive a Chevette?  That's what I liken carrying the Star Destroyer to the pad to.  Creaks, rattles, squeaks, badly glued fiddly bits, it's like its own little symphony.  Performed by toddlers.  With pots, pans and kazoos.  Anyway, after the aforementioned trip back to the car for the Altoids tins, things were ready from my end.  When I first flew this eight years ago, I remember being impressed with the performance.  It left the pad nicely and managed to stay together through the whole flight and recovered well on the 18" parachute.  This would be a D12-3 flight, but at some point during the rebuild I seriously considered putting an E-mount in it.  I forget why I stuck with the D mount, but I suspect that the D hook was close at hand while the E hook would have required something of a quest.  I'm old and tired, so bah quests.  The D12-3 did fine as expected, a solid show of 70's high power, straight and stable off the pad to 300'.  Ejection occurred just before apogee, which may explain the chute deploying funny and bringing things back down in a parawad recovery.  It hit hard behind the flightline, but everything held together.

I think the Sunward Star Watcher is on the third or fourth paint job, this one turned out more like I had expected, so it's likely permanent.  This is actually not a Sunward product, but something I cloned using one of the nose cones from the Gravity Rider.  This would be a C6-5 flight, and unlike the Gravity Rider, 18mm power is perfect for it.

The Star Watcher left the pad with something of an arc to the right, directly into the sun.  I was immediately glare blind, but I kept the phone pointed at the point of apogee.  The Star Watcher flight topped out around 500' and was pointing down when the ejection charge fired.  It then rode the breeze back toward the maintenance shed to our right, and I initially thought it was heading for a landing on the roof or on top of one of the storage containers, but it looked to come down just beyond both.  When I got to the landing site, I found the Star Watcher draped over Forest Gump's riding mower.  Tom Hanks was nowhere to be found.

I made my spurs on flight #3.  Like a lot of folks, I went a little nuts back in the days of the Estes Clearance sales.  I bought pretty much anything that looked interesting, which is how I came to own an Estes M.I.R.V.  I opened it soon after it arrived, but it took a while for me to wrap my brain around it.  I recently finished construction and painted it this past week.  Friday night I sprayed my first coat of acrylic clear over the acrylic black that I'd brushed on earlier in the week.  By Saturday morning it looked like my rocket had become gangrenous.  I pressed on and applied a few of the decals, which were almost as much fun.  It doesn't look awful from ten feet.  Well, maybe fifteen.

I was skeptical about the idea of getting this thing off the pad on a C6-0.  I was even more skeptical about the idea of the ducting that needed to take place for the C6-0 to ignite the three A10-3Ts.  This isn't a rocket that you see on the pads often, but even with everyone watching up and down the flightline, I had the LCO call it a heads-up flight.  It rewarded me almost at ignition as it took a left turn that only became more pronounced as the C6 kept boosting.  It had already passed back over the flightline when it staged, and the laughter had already started.  It was over the outfield of the baseball field behind us when it staged.  The spent booster impaled the outfield grass and for a moment the three sustainers flew together in formation.  I doubt that my Level 1 will bring as many high fives as I got after the M.I.R.V. flight.  I headed for the sustainers first, because no one could see them once they got behind the EZ-Ups.  They were found still fairly tightly grouped within thirty feet of each other by an as yet unused light standard.  Mike Rohde suggested that I post the whole video.  Unfortunately I think all you'll here is me.

How do you follow that?  I thought long and hard about that, and decided upon the Jet Freak, a small boost glider built on an NAR plan.  Okay, so I didn't think at all.  I just reached in and grabbed something that had a motor in it, which was everything in the car.  I have a long history over a short time with the Jet Freak.  My first one flew at B6-4 field and flew away on the first flight.  It was an unpainted balsa glider, and was much the same color as the rest of the February landscape, so finding it after it glided off was just not happening.  I painted subsequent versions, all of which flew badly.  I made a concerted effort to use markers to color this one, but it was built using whatever I had on hand, big nose cone included.  

I spent Saturday test gliding the Jet Freak and adding glue to the back end of the rocket.  I got it to the point of a stall across the yard.  Unfortunately, the A8-3 flight on Sunday, while quite high, came in pretty much ballistic.  I think the nose cone is just too heavy to really work with.  (Although with each landing it gets shorter, so I've got that going for me.)

Nex on the pad would be an actual TLP bird, not one of my guess-your-best clones.  The Hellfire AGM-114A last flew here in 2018.  In fact, that's when it last flew anywhere.  This might actually be a candidate for flight at B6-4 Field with a C11-3, but to this point I don't have any C11-3s on hand.  That's probably for the best.

The Hellfire is nothing if not consistent.  The previous flight had been here at eRockets Field and I distinctly remember the flight being largely straight, but with a slightly jinking flight path.  I had the altitude on that flight listed as 750', but I think I was full of crap that day.  This flight would follow that. same flight path to about 400'.  It was still moving up at a good clip when the ejection charge of the D12-3 fired, so a D12-5 might be better for the next flight.  The 15" parachute looked to be a great choice except that it appeared to have the Hellfire on a collision course with the asphalt access road behind the cars, but in the end it missed it by several inches.  

Back in the good-old-days, I found an Estes Prowler on the racks at Johnny's Toys (RIP).  I was in my cluster phase at that point, and no BT-60 kit was safe.  I built the Prowler as a cluster and took it to fly at VOA unpainted for the first flight.  It was a great flight, but the ejection charge snapped the Kevlar shock cord.  I recovered the nose cone and parachute, but never saw where the body tube landed.  After we left the field that night, I hit another Johnny's and found one on the rack there.  I built this one as intended, single 18mm power, painted it blue because I'm past my purple phase, and applied the sticker decals.  They lasted one flight before they started unpeeling.  They were the glow in the dark stickers, so I liked the idea of them, but I couldn't see trying to replace the adhesive.  Enter CMR once again.  The new decals don't glow in the dark, but that was a novelty anyway.

The Prowler flight would be on a C6-5, a motor that looked to be borderline for getting the rocket off the rod safely.  It recovered quickly and flew a largely straight flight path to around 400'.  Ejection occurred at apogee and the Prowler recovered behind the parking area just at the edge of the outfield fence in deepest center field.  Except for the slight hesitation leaving the rod, the flight was pretty much perfect.

I ordered an Estes B.O.S.S. as soon as it became available.  I love that it harkened back to the sci-fi kits of the late 70's.  It would have fit in nicely with the Satellite Interceptor, Andromeda and Odyssey.  Now it can.  It still needs paint, and I'm in no way looking forward to the sanding that I'll be doing, but I'm quite pleased with how it turned out.

The B.O.S.S. would be a C6-5 flight.  It was quick off the pad with a slight lean to the left, but topped out around 750', just over our heads.  It looked to be still climbing when the ejection charge fired, but not fast enough to cause any kind of zipper damage. I used the same 12" nylon chute that I'd used a couple of times already on the day, and the recovery drift was fairly quick.  It also flirted with the asphalt, but wound up across the access road in the grass with several inches to spare.

The Estes Long Tom was a long-ago clearance sale bird that I built, thought about painting, then decided that I liked the old school cardboard and balsa look too much to consider painting it.  That was a few years ago.  These days I'm looking at it and thinking that I need to get busy painting it while the weather holds out.

The more traditional of my two multi-stage flight would be C6-0/B6-6.  Happily not sideways.  I angled the rod to take the flight out away from the flightline, figuring that the breeze would bring it back our way, but not fast enough for the road to be in play.  Tom left the pad heading out away from us and slightly right.  It staged around 250' and the sustainer kept going out over the soccer fields to around 750'.  At ejection the chute fouled, which also helped cut down on the drift and the sustainer recovered just to the left of the pads.  The booster was recovered behind the high power pads.

The Estes Yankee was one of the vintage birds from my youth that was still available when I became a BAR back in 2001.  I never owned one then, but I remember seeing one on the racks at Johnny's when I was in college.  In my mind, that was good enough.  Much like the Wizard, the paint job had suffered in the ensuing years, and stickers had taken over for the all-white decals.  I tried in vain to win a vintage set via eBay, but recently got a set from CMR, the company that had bought Tango Papa decals from Tom Prestia.  The flight would be a B6-6, which I considered iffy, even on the big field.

I used to fly Wizards on C6-7s at VOA years ago, but that was back when my eyes were younger and the field more expansive.  You had to hope you saw the puff and could follow the streamer down.  The B6-6 flight was much the same way.  I tried to catch the launch itself on video, and by the time I looked up, a whiff of smoke was all that was left.  Altitude was impressive, around 750-800' and ejection occurred while the rocket was still pointing skyward, just to the right of the pads.  Recovery was quick, thanks to a tiny THOY parachute, and the Yankee landed safely behind the flightline where the bulk of flights landed on the day. 

The seldom-seen Semroc Aphelion was next on the pad.  Seriously, how many of these have you seen fly?  The C6-5 flight would be its third, and the first one anywhere other than B6-4 Field on an A8-3.  The Aphelion was one of the rockets that Carl started out the original Semroc with, and I tried to pick up his originals whenever he released them.

Flight was excellent, fairly straight with a slight bend to the left.  It topped out somewhere around 800', then began crossing the field back to the right.  It landed in the wastelands near the maintenance shed and I was able to recover another rocket that landed nearby.

This would be the third flight of the Estes Yankee Clipper, and the first since 2013.  I kinda lost enthusiasm for this bird when a feh B6-4 charge didn't clear the parachute from the body tube and the whole mess came in ballistic, crushing the top of the tube.  Every now and then the name pops up on my "needs to be flown" lists and it gets dragged out for a flight.  This time the flight would be on a C6-5.

Another mostly straight flight that leaned out a bit toward the soccer fields.  The flight topped out north of 800' and this time there was no issue with the ejection charge.  The chute deployed as you'd hope all of them would and it began drifting back our way, right of the pads.  It landed just over the fence in center field, just behind the flightline.

Flight #12 would be my recently completed Centuri Firebird clone.  I'd made a list of late arrival Centuri badged kits that were originated after the Damon merger and thus used Estes parts.  The Firebird was on that list.  It wasn't until the scans were posted at TRF that I got interested in building a clone, and then it was ready to fly within a couple of hours.  Finishing would take longer, but after I queried CMR about making up a set of the decals and they had them done in a day, things went pretty quickly.

This was a C6-5 flight, because big field, eh?  Well, the flight was impressive, not quite to 1000' like the catalog claimed, but solidly around 800', and out over the high power pads.  I should have thought it out better and used a reefed chute, but I went with a 12' unreefed chute.  It almost cost me.  The Firebird ejected as it was still pointing up, then began drifting back toward the flightline, only it didn't appear to be descending.  It looked like it was destined for the trees on the first base line of the baseball field, but fell just short.  Prez Dave was recovering one of his rockets in the area and gathered it up for me.

Despite the carnival of the M.I.R.V., the day had gone fairly smoothly, with all rockets present and accounted for post flight and nothing even looking like it would threaten Rip Rap Road.  Then I flew the Canaroc FK-3.  While not an actual Canaroc bird, I was still pleased with how this clone turned out.  The homemade decals were slightly large, but this was apparently not noticeable to anyone except me.  This would be the third flight of the FK-3, the previous two being A8-3 flights at B6-4 field, so I decided on a C6-5 flight here at the big field.  

I knew the FK-3 was in trouble as soon as it took off.  Unlike almost every other flight I'd made on the day. it boosted back over the flightline to about 800', then began cruising a thermal back over the cars, the ballfields, Rip Rap Road, and the trees, looking like it had a map and was hunting for the river.  I watched it the whole way and toward the end of the drift when it was over the former eRockets building, I thought I saw something land in the back of the parking lot.  I drove over and walked into the back lot, only to find that I'd seen a leaf fall.  Uh, oops.

The newly painted Semroc Swift was next on the pad for flight 14.  I think Carl or Sheryl threw this in on an order and it was built during one of my "watch a ballgame and build something" sessions when I could still sit comfortably on the floor.  Those days are gone, at least until I get a home crane.

There are straight flights and there are STRAIGHT flights.  This one was the latter.  The B6-6 flight left the pad and reached apogee almost before I had the chance to look up from the launch shot.  The face card of the kit claims 950' on a B6-6, but I estimated 600'.  Whatever the case, it was high and straight.  I caught it streaming back to the pad just to my left, and it hit the caution tape and wrapped itself in it at landing.  It may have been 20' from the pad.

At this point, I had one rocket left to fly, the Quest Commander, which is the Quest version of the Estes Star Blazer.  After seeing the Yankee on a B6-6, loading this one with the same motor was a no brainer.  Based on the outcome, hooking it up might have been done with a few less brain cells than necessary, as well.

Some on the flightline had opinions on whether this was a flight or not.  In my opinion, I used a motor, so it's a flight.  Albeit a low level one.  As you may have suspected, the motor hook got caught on the clothes pin standoff.  Lots of smoke.  Excellent streamer deployment.  Not much altitude, but an easy recovery.

Nothing to see here.  Move along.

At this point, I'd flown everything I'd brought.  I had some motors left, but nothing that made me want to fly anything else, even the failed Commander.  Truth is, I was pooped.  All I wanted was a cold drink and a shady spot under someone else's EZ Up until the time came to strike the range.  Luckily I had one drink left in the cooler and found some shade under the Merlin Missiles canopy.  I had no idea how many rockets I'd flown on the day, but I knew that with three days marooned at a satellite office, there would be a quick turnaround on this blog update.

That was 18 days ago.  So much for the quick turnaround