(from William Bercini)

Mother Nature gave us a break from the oppressive heat just in time for the September Lilly launch. The weather conditions were nearly ideal for on Saturday, even the gnats gave us a bit of a break! Some thirty-one folks, young and old, posted flights that first day. Among the young folks participating was Login Davin. This was Login’s first visit to a SoAR launch. Assisted by his adult mentor, Lee Greenway, he spent most of the day working on “Project Hijinx”. Using a simple altitude tracking device, he collected data on the same rocket using three different nose cone shapes: conical, ogive, and elliptical. We wish him well on his science project.

The rest of us were not being quite so serious. And speaking of “not-so- serious”, our own Kevin Scholberg posted what was perhaps the most unusual flight of the day. He had flight-converted a $3 “flying disk” toy. But taking it to the next level, he CHAD-staged it with two C6-0 motors. In spite of some naysayers, the whirling disk put in beautiful flight. But Kevin was not alone when it came to creative designs. Chevis White had a small fleet of beautifully crafted original designs. Among them was his scratch bird, “The Squid”. It featured tube stabilizers and a canted cluster motor configuration (a la Fliskits Deuce). Its maiden flight on two E28 motors was a sight to behold.

My life-long friend, Gary Byrum, came down from NC to attend. Gary has been working with Layne Pemberton (of Pemberton Technologies) to improve the flight characteristics of a new kit under
development, Starship Achilles (no relation to the Star Trek nor Stargate universes). In spite of Gary’s many improvements, the flight demonstrated more room for improvement. While on the topic of Pemberton designs, I must mention Shawn O’Connor’s Space Ark. He had his reservations about pushing this rocket up to “H” impulse, even calling it a “heads up”. But he was rewarded with gorgeous straight up flight. I gotta get one of those!

Halfway through the day I gave George Blanco a break from the RSO/LCO duties on the condition he fly something! Between schmoozing breaks, he readied his scratch-built Sandia Sandhawk with a J420 motor, the largest motor of the day. As far as we could tell from the ground, it was a textbook flight.

Suddenly, there was “scream” reminiscent of an aircraft turbine. Nobody saw the free-falling tail section until it “macheted” into the ground just behind the flight line. George determined there had been a quik-link failure.

Kevin Reichert came down from SC to join us. Kevin had a number of scale designs to test out. Among them was a successful flight of his two-staged boilerplate of the Indian BrahMos missile. In this hobby we get used to seeing Saturns and Tomahawks; it was refreshing to see an atypical scale subject.

My favorite flight of the day would have to have been Ron Stancils’ stock Estes Mean Machine under G12 power. This motor has an 8-second burn! There it was, this long rocket, “hissing” upward as if powered by a steam engine. If only the recovery had worked as well as the boost….

After the launch there was the traditional gathering at Sonny’s BBQ in Perry. As usual, the conversation demonstrated the serious nature of our membership. This time we executed scholarly analysis of Mel Brooks movies.

Sunday started off with pretty much the same weather conditions as on Saturday. However, as the day progressed, we had some localized rain clouds move through. Twice we had to stop for showers that lasted no more than 5 minutes. Fortunately, the bigger clouds skipped us. Nevertheless, the wind was up from the day before, especially at higher altitudes. This meant some longer walks for recovery, but much fewer gnats!

People were not so diligent with the flight cards on the second day. I can only report on the flights that were documented. According to the flight cards, we had 11 folks flying on Sunday. I know for a fact that Ron Stancil and Kevin Scholberg put up flights on Sunday, but since they (and others?) provided no flight cards, they are not included in the counts for the day.

The pace of the day was really laid back compared to the day before. According to the flight cards, we put up 43 flights. To my knowledge, only one person attended on Sunday that had not been there the day before, Herb Howe. Herb posted a number of high power flights. His most notable flight had to have been his LOC/Precision Doorknob under J354 power. It was the largest and most powerful flight of the weekend. It can be described with one word: WOW.

Kevin Boyd was the most prolific flyer of the weekend, posting 13 flights in one day. Given that Kevin split his time with taking pictures of the launch, this was quite an accomplishment. As I said before, Herb posted the most powerful flight. On the other end of the spectrum, I posted the flight with the lowest impulse: an MMX Honest John.

Said Lee Greenway of the weekend: “The experience was phenomenal – we THOROUGHLY enjoyed every minute of it … We are all looking forward to coming out to launch days in the future…Thanks again for such a warm welcome and for putting up with a newbie and an as-good- as newbie (the last rocket I flew before Saturday was an Estes Patriot in my front yard back in 1993 or 4).  Again, we couldn’t have had a better time!”

And now for the requisite motor statistics:

• 1/8A – 1
• A – 20
• B – 13
• C – 34
• D – 22
• E – 26
• F – 23
• G – 28
• H – 12
• I – 11
• J – 2

There was a grand total of 184 (documented) flights over the course of the weekend. Among these were 6 staged flights and 8 clustered flights.