NC Rocketry

It is customary for the Spring WELD event to suffer from horrible weather conditions, and that was half-true for this weekend. The weather forecast for Saturday was “windy”, and that was exactly what it was! The winds started out at more than 15 MPH and increased all day long, there were periods of more than 25 MPH. I spend most of the day sitting in the lee of my truck and trying to keep my tool boxes from blowing off the tables. There were some bad dust storms on the eastern margins of the field that obscured the view of the tree line, it was just plain horrible, most of the time it was hard to stand up straight. In spite of the conditions, Warren English showed up and flew 2 rockets: A small rocket called?Ghost?on a G motor of some sort, that drifted so far he needed about an hour to find it and bring it home. Then he flew his new 4″ rocket, called?Scratch,?on an Aerotech I357T (I think). I?m a little vague about those 2 flights because those two launch cards did not make it home with me. They might have blown away! Continue reading →

Saturday was a great example of a point I have been trying to make for several years: The weather forecasts for the far east of North Carolina are not very accurate. Saturday?s forecast was fairly discouraging, promising only a few hours of poor weather followed by drenching rain starting at about noon to 1 PM. In fact, the skies were cloudy, winds were mild, and we could have flown all the way to 6:00 PM without getting wet. The cloud ceiling was around 3000 to 3500 feet all day, so nobody was extremely inhibited about flying, everybody had something in the box that would stay within that range. Continue reading →

A huge thank-you to Dave Morey and Jim Livingston who got the launch started on Saturday while I was getting myself together after a week of traveling. Jim spent a lot of time with the USLI team from North Carolina State University on Saturday and helped them out a lot. I?ll have more to say about that project later. The weather was fabulous (for a February) and contributed to the good turnout. Let?s have a look at the motor use summary and talk more about individual flights after that. Continue reading →