Halloween Launch Report

Report courtesy of Dave Proffit

Jeff and I walked out to the pads and He helped me install Halloween on the #7 pad and we hefted "The Animal" onto pad 8 next door. After reminding each other to arm our altimeters Steve Tarr pushed the button on "The Animal" and it took off with a tail wag and up and away ! Nice flight, at central motor burn out the outboards lit and she continued her flight. Upon seeing Jeff later on that day I was dismayed to learn that the "Animal" had suffered some in flight damages.

Steve pushed the button on Halloween and it came off the launcher with a vengenece! Wow! Had a tad bit of tail wag too. However that 98mm motor just forced it to fly straight. It went up and at about 1000 feet the motor was really putting out and it literally went into warp drive! It kept going and going! I installed a 56" bright orange chute on it because that's the smallest one I had. We saw deployment but it was totally specked out! The wind blew the thing completely acrossed hwy 20 and a mile and a half at least to a field where it came down about 1/4 of a mile shy of some big power lines and adjacent to the MOPAR bone yard that Jane showed me. It was truly a Discovery Channel type of recovery event. The only thing that would have made it more authentic would have been some Sherpa guides! I won't go into my endeavors with the Walston Receiver on my first attempt to track it. Suffice to say I had never used one and was going in a direction 180 degrees from where the rocket landed. Rick Clapp came to Jane and myself's rescue and with his help and Jane's help after I fell down, LOL :-) we found the thing. The point of the Walston is this: IF we hadn't put the transmitter on this rocket there's no way in HELL we would have found it period. NO WAY. it was so far out into this field that most people wouldn't have thought it would not have drifted that far. I also lost my ground track on it so I wasn't feeling real confident we'd find it. We did.

Upon seeing the orange chute we all started smiling again. Halloween was hurt pretty bad. There was a huge zipper and a radial crack around mid span on the forward airframe. One fin had also come off. The Chute was in fine shape and the motor case was still with the rocket. I haven't been able to download the ALTACC due to reasons beyond my understanding of why pc's do what they do. So. That was my flight. Anyway it was fun and the meet was great albiet a tad windy. More that a tad actually. I brought Halloween home in a garbage bag! :-) anyway I'll look at it some more and see what I come up with.