Flight

For the first flight I used an Estes B4-2, which is one of the engines suggested in the instructions.  The instructions claimed that this motor would take the rocket to 144 feet, which is pretty close to what I think it got to.  B6-4 Field is fairly cozy, so I wanted to start things off with a low level flight just to see if it would actually leave the rod.  As a matter of fact, it left the rod fairly nicely, and actually appeared to be flying as advertised before there was an "anomaly" (i.e. the plastic flight coupler uncoupled,) and the whole mess started skywriting.  At the time I thought that would be it, and retired the rocket for a couple of years until I decided to re-glue the parts and try again.

Re-glued and with improved nose weight, I tried it again in the summer of 2015.  This time I decided to go with the C6-3 because, let's face it, the thing is a pig and not likely to overfly B6-4 Field.  This flight looked good in the viewfinder, but the skywriting once again began before the camera burst mode had recycled itself.  It looked like it was going to hit the ground under power, which surely would have ended its flying career, but the ejection charge fired about 20 feet off the ground and the chute had time to fill before disaster, and entertainment, struck.  Hard to imagine this bird on a C6-5.  I decided again that it would be the retirement flight, but much like The Who, this bird has had multiple retirements.

For the third flight I swapped out the kit nose cone for another that I had heavily weighted for another rocket that was destroyed by CATO earlier in the year.  This flight also eventually ended up unstable, but first climbed to an altitude more in keeping with the package claims.  At the field I would have sworn that would be the last flight, but now I'm not so sure.  This is starting to become a quest and I'm worried.