Article: 2150
By Keith Packard April 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@intel.com