| Events | Rockets | Useful Stuff | Other | bobarnott.com |
|
||||||
|
||||||
|
Guy Sinclair got things moving with another flight of his highly repaired Loc Onyx rocket called, The Hornet, on an Aerotech G35. Gary Groves was up next with his Loc Caliber on a Pro38 H110 that fairly shot of the pad. The rise of Pro38 motor in the UK has been impressive, probably due to the fact that there are no Aerotech motors left and the Pro's are the only thing that folks can get from the vendors.
There weren't very many high power flights due to Pete's absence, so the majority of flights were from the model pads with a few G's thrown in for good measure. Warren Stamp passed his UKRA Model Achievement Program Level 1 and other model flights were made by Adrian Waters, Mike Roberts, Felix Sinclair, Richard Wilson, Tom Hicks and Samuel Britton. Since I had recently passed my RSO exam, I finally stepped up to the plate and did some RSO'ing with Steve Randall. The first rocket I took a look at was Gary Groves PML AMRAAM 4, which he lobbed on a Pro38 I170 for a cracking flight. The cloud base at this point was starting to break up, but there was still a higher plane of cloud, so it meant that high flights were still off the cards.
Sal's Chocolate Cheesecake Hybrid was an attempt at UKRA Level 1 certification on an I222, she failed when the rocket bent in half a couple of hundred feet into the flight. I've never seen a Hypertek powered rocket leave the pad so quickly in my life, I was shooting at 1/500th of a second, which is normally enough to freeze the action, but not in this case. Richard's I205 powered Hephaestus, suffered a recover failure when the main parachute didn't deploy, leaving the rocket to tumble in under it's drogue. Adrian Waters also had an attempt with his newly finished PML Black Brant VB on a 2 grain Pro38 H110. Unfortunately for Addy, the rocket drifted quite a distance and since he didn't have a tracker on board, the rocket was lost. I'm sure Addy will be back soon with another rocket and will bag Level 1. That's about all the flying there was apart from the biggest flight of the day and definitely the flight of the year from the EARS site so far.
It took Chris most of the day to set the pad and rocket up and by the time he'd finished there was a whacking great patch of blue sky overhead. My parent had also just turned up, as they were down visiting and they haven't seen any really large rockets go before, so they got a right treat. It didn't take too long to fill the Hypertek L tank and with a quick wait for a lull in the wind of she went. Wow, the noise from standing a bit too close to these beasts is awesome, the farting and burping is phenomenal. The best bit about Chris' flight was the live telemetry downlink via the RDAS transmitter board. It meant that Roy, who was RSO'ing the flight, could call out the altitude as the rocket stormed to over 7,000 feet. With the recovery system working flawlessly, the whole rocket was recovered in the next field, only a few hundred meters away, not bad for a flight over 7,000 feet. It was a bit of a quiet launch over all, brightened up by the smoke charges that were being left off all day. Pete not being there certainly had an effect, although with three new EARS members, it wasn't a total loss.
Copyright © 1999-2007, Fatboab, all rights reserved.
|
I woke up on the morning of the launch, after we'd had a load of variable weather during the week and was instantly disappointed. There wasn't any blue sky to be seen and the cloud base looked quite low, the big question was, would the weather improve? I got what I thought was all the stuff together and headed out to the launch site, only to discover that I'd forgotten the RSO tent and Adrian Waters Level 1 motor. So a quick trip back home to pick up the remaining stuff and we were all ready to go.
Talking about vendors, Pete's Rockets missed this launch, which makes this the first time that Pete hasn't been present at an EARS launch event since we started in November 2000. Due to this and the not so great weather, it turned out to be quite a quiet launch with only 23 flights being made throughout the day and everyone being packed up and ready to go home by six o'clock. Normally at this time of year folks are still wanting to lob rockets at around 8 o'clock, so it was nice to get home early for a change.
As the afternoon progressed the cloud cover slowly parted to reveal large chunks of blue sky, during this time a number of high power flights were made. Gary Sinclair flew his VB King Blobbo on a 6 grain Pro38 J360, which really gave this rocket a good workout, both Sal and Richard Osborne flew Hypertek I's with mixed results.
Chris Key turned up with his Plasma rocket, that he flew from the EARS site in December last year on a K1100. He tried to fly it at UKRA 2002, but had turned up on the Sunday when the weather was at it's worst, so he was gagging to get it launched. The rocket its self boasted two cameras and a RDAS GPS and transmitter package, the pad boasted a further five camera looking at various aspects of the rocket launch sequence, it was all most impressive.