We had a nice Saturday launch day between snow storms at the Old National Pike Park. The wind was below 10 mph and the temperature was over 40 degrees.  The field was a little wet as the show melted on frozen ground, but we got off some nice flights and are closing in on some rockets that will give us a good TARC qualification score.

Objectives:

• Get some altitude data with the new altimeters.
• Use real eggs to check the padding techniques and impact issues.
• Check out version 2 of the Fat Boy design and the Big Daddy rear ejection design.

Lessons:

• All the flights were relatively straight up, but there were different directions of the end of the flight at apogee.  We may have over or under compensated for the wind coming out of the Northwest.  Some came down close to the Northeast tree line, but some came down on the South field hill.
• We have to learn to clean out the reloadable hardware immediately after launch.
• We had no problems with shock cords, parachutes burning, or cargo units opening up.
• We had a problem getting the Aerotech igniter to work.  We need to investigate other sources for igniters. We also need to acquire the small rubber bands that are used to hold the igniter.
• Since we had some extra time between launches due to the weather, we were better organized with our rocket and tool boxes.
• The Big Daddy, version 2, flew three times on three different motors. The first two times were nice and the chutes deployed correctly.  The last time we had premature deployment of the chutes and the rocket and engine casing were damaged.  After looking at the engine casing, we believe the propulsion gases got around the top "O" ring and ignited the ejection charge.