THOR Club launch November 18th 2006 Windy conditions grounded higher flights of the day... |
Our November club launch was one of the smaller ones what it came to attendance. Besides Manuel (left), Bob (right) and ourselves at the flight line (top left), we also had Astron Mike launching off his gliders from 'away cell' (top right) where the rather blustery wind's direction did fit his needs better... We also had a few semi-regulars and newcomers stop by to launch a few birds... Thanks and ya'll come back again come next month, ya hear ! |
It was a nice and crisp Florida day, but the wind was gusting up quite a bit giving us some hard time. We tried to launch between the worst gusts and had a few successful flights in. On the left is my Crayon 3E on three D12-3's to keep her low and slow, on the right is Manuel's scratch built triple C6 cluster. I had both the Solaris and Crayon X1 prepped with G64W's but decided to keep them both grounded since landing a 1000'+ altitude flight on the field looked unlikely. At least this time I set my padcam on the upwind side, halfway decent video clip here: |
Bob's tube fin rocket launched straight and true, also it had the nicest recovery of the day (top left and right). My Patriot PAC3.1 went up on a twin C6-5 cluster almost sailing out of field, closely followed by Manuel's bright orange sounding rocket. We had a few flights land hard due to tangled up chutes or partial deployments. A couple of rockets got permanently stored on treetops as well... Swein Wind... :-) |
Bob prepped his new Penetrator with C6, and let her rip... Unfortunately a delay failure caused her to lawndart downrange. Looks like she'll fly again with 3" shorter main tube... Yupp, definitely a penetrator allright.... :-) |
Astron Mike flew another rare bird, a flex wing glider. It has kite like plastic wings folded up alongside the body tube and tied to a crossbar with two lengths of elastic. At the ejection, the wings deploy for a glider recovery. You can see the puff of smoke from the ejection charge and the wings in the middle of deployment in the picture on top center... Nice concept and very rarely seen at launches. Thanks Mike for the experience ! |