[Rockets] 04/18 OROC Tillamook Launch Report

Keith Packard keithp at keithp.com
Sun Apr 18 21:58:34 PDT 2010


Carefully sneaking into a weather window, the OROC gang descended on the
Tillamook airport today. I don't think anyone counted the crowd, but it
was impressive. Winds were calm while setting up, and gradually
increased until I was wondering whether we'd need to suspend flight
operations, but then as the afternoon wore on, the winds
abated. Fortunately, almost all of the rockets landed on the
airport. Some a bit harder than others.

Nine people came out to get their L1 ticket, eight of them under TRA
rules and one NAR:

Don Coon                H123    TRA L1 Fred Azinger
Steve Cutonilli         I205    TRA L1 Fred Azinger
Mike LaRochelle         H123    NAR L1 David Armstrong & Keith Packard
David Camarillo         I600    TRA L1 Fred Azinger
Andrew Greenberg        I245    TRA L1 Fred Azinger
Dan Kirkpatrick         I600    TRA L1 Fred Azinger
Casy Repp               I366    TRA L1 Fred Azinger
Jeremy Booth            I366    TRA L1 Fred Azinger

We had one spectacular L1 cert failure today -- Ben Kaplin's Liberty 4
failed to deploy the chute and lawn darted into the pavement. That stuff
is hard. We all felt for you today, Ben.

A big "thank you" to Fred for coming out to watch all of these TRA
flights. Seven new L1 flyers in one day has got to be some kind of
record, at least for April.

Fred was kept busy all day watching cert flighs. He managed to get one
launch in -- his Small Endevour was the only lost rocket today. It
landed east of the airport on top of the AIR MUSÉUM -- the 'E' is now
accented with a chute and an airframe.

Bernard Cawley kept coming up to the LCO table with new airframes, for
the last flight of the day he had a tiny little Crayon rocket with a
1/8A motor. A delightful way to close out a beautiful day.

We also got quite the lesson in helicopter flight operations today, with
one pilot practicing landings for about 30 minutes while we got to
watch. There were several other planes in the air for while, but
eventually they all got bored and we had the airport to ourselves for
the last hour or so. With all of that traffic, we still managed to get
in an impressive number of launches.

The usual launch stats:

       Launches:                61
       Successful flights:      54
       Flyers:                  29
       Rockets:                 53
       Most Flights:            13 Bernard Cawley
       Biggest Motor:           I600 Dan Kirkpatrick/David Camarillo

A huge thanks to Randy Birzer for getting the waiver and running LCO
most of the day today. And, our loyal Launch Organizer, Robert Nech for
arranging this most excellent new launch site, and to the staff of the
Tillamook airport for letting us come and fly.

With this many people attending, we need to think about getting more
high power GSE to this launch; Randy brought a 4' rail, but that was
all we had. One more 8' long 1010 rail would really have helped reduce
launch delays.

-- 
keith.packard at intel.com
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: </pipermail/rockets/attachments/20100418/9ca19d60/attachment.pgp>


More information about the Rockets mailing list