High altitude winds

[Chris LaPanse]

80 knots is not bad (seriously). I’d forego the drogue chute, just breaking in half… which is how I always do it anyway.

We need to stay off the private property this year…

I don’t like foregoing the drogue – it leaves too much of the recovery up to chance. With a drogue, you can make sure everything is oriented properly so the booster is below the main when it deploys. That having been said, I am using a small drogue (reefed 28 inch) on a fairly heavy rocket (~35lbs recovery weight), so it should drop like a rock – I’m guessing 80-100fps in the lower atmosphere, and faster up in the thin air near apogee. I’m more concerned if I were to dump the main – I’ve taken quite a few precautions to prevent that, but it’s always possible.

Also, the upper level winds are forecast to be pretty much straight east. Isn’t the private property more to the north (just to clarify)?

[SCOTT EVANS]

Mike Konshak had posted a map here once a couple years back.
Search the archives.

[edwardModerator]

You could use a very porous drogue – on my L3 I used a 36″ parachute with a 18″ hole in the center 🙂 Landed near the 3rd windmill.

Edward

[John A. WilkeParticipant]

The private property starts about 1 mile to the east (IIRC). It is closer than you think.

With regard to having laundry or no laundry on a drogue, I’m guessing I’ve gone with dual deploy about 200 times. 195 of those had no drogue, and I’ve never had entanglement or significant rebound damage. I’ve never – not even once – had a chute fail to open, at least once it gets out of the airframe.

As I’ve said many times on this forum – You’ve got to go with what you are comfortable with… and I’m surely not suggesting a drogue chute is bad. I’m saying I have had perfect success without them. More importantly, I think you need to overlay things with the fact that you have winds forecasted to 80 knots going towards private property. ANYTHING you can do to mitigate trespassing (including not flying into the jet stream) needs to be taken into consideration. I’m personally going to do everything I can do to avoid landing on private property, period.

[Warren B. MusselmanModerator]

Given the winds, I’ve cancelled my one sorta-planned flight – a 54mm MD full K and am planning on keeping my only other potential flight under 15K. I suggest you think about it if you’re thinking of going higher. Much better to wait until another opportunity than to land on private property.

[Chris LaPanse]

Looking at the map (http://telerover.com/rockets/NCR/NCR_NPawneePropertyOwners.pdf), east is actually relatively clear. To the north is the property people kept hitting last year.

[edwardModerator]

Chris, I’ve got a 50 pound bag of lead shot we can dump in your rocket to keep the altitude down.

Edward

[AdrianParticipant]

Looking at the map (http://telerover.com/rockets/NCR/NCR_NPawneePropertyOwners.pdf), east is actually relatively clear. To the north is the property people kept hitting last year.

Indeed. The property to the North is outside of the Pawnee National Grasslands boundary. I have worked with the owner several times to recover rockets, and make no mistake about it, there is nothing public about his property. Joe and I have his number in case a rocket lands over there. You can look at Google maps to see the boundary of the national grassland. I have found the Konshack maps to be misleading in this regard. The Northern boundary depends on how far East you are, but due North of the site it’s not very far away at all.

Everything within landing distance E, S, and W of our site is within the national grasslands, at least. But I’m a little fuzzy on what that means, exactly, for rocket recovery. On the national grassland, is everything technically owned by all of us taxpayers, and leased to the ranchers? What about where there are houses & buildings, etc? Do we need special permission to recover rockets on leased land? Is the parcel of land that we launch from equivalent to other parcels on the South side of County Road 122? Who is leasing the part of it that we launch from?

[BEAR]

I am in the process of making a map from public records of all the parcels surrounding the launch site. As a realtor, ( among many things), if you lease a piece of property, you have property rights, and people are not allowed to come onto the property in your possession without permission or they are trespassing. Same as if you lease a house or a building, or anything else. It does not change just because it is open land.

[Warren B. MusselmanModerator]

There are leases and then there are grazing leases. In the first case, they pay for exclusive use of the land – that doesn’t mean you’re trespassing (though most seem to think so), it just means you’re likely pissing them off and the local USFS and Sheriff will likely side with the rancher. They won’t win in court, but you’ll still have to deal with the hassle.

In the second case, they pay a per-head fee (usually on the basis of a cow/calf pair) for the time that the animals are grazing that particular parcel. In most cases this is just a few months a year (our launch site is such a parcel). Again, most of the ranchers seem to think this gives them exclusive rights – at least while their livestock is present. In this case, you’ll piss off the rancher and if they bitch to USFS, it just is another ass-pain we present to them. Fortunately the rancher who has a grazing lease on our launch site is used to us and aware of our use. He works with USFS and indirectly with the club – we have rescheduled launches or shut down flight operations on his behalf when he moves cattle.

In either event, it is absolutely imperative that you ask permission FIRST for the lands 1m or more east or west of the pads, whether N or S of Rd 122. The land north of the ORV area is most definitely private land and I can’t count the number of times some of us have wandered about on that land. We’ve been VERY fortunate that the owner hasn’t caught us – to be honest. I can recall a flight I helped recover that went well over the bluffs (I won’t say who’s bird it was) where we would most definitely have been guilty of trespassing had we been caught. Even a mile south of the bluffs is private.

One new factor may be the drilling company that has just set up shop. Those folks tend to be even more pissy about trespassing, regardless of the legalities. Better safe than sorry. We have the best launch site in Colorado and any alternative we might find would be hours away. We should be like Ceasar’s Wife – beyond suspicion and absolutely place good relations with adjoining landowners far above our own immediate need.

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