THOR-Nov-06

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 !