NCR Club Launch - April 2007

Saturday April 14th, 2007

Launch Summary

Regularly scheduled club launch. The weather finally cooperated for our first launch of 2007. Appropriately, this launch was declared a Cluster Event and Tim Thomas provided a Viper III kit as an incentive. 32 flyers put up 80 flights. The race is on for the most flights of the year with Ryan Plattner lofting eight times, followed by Chandon Stone's seven flights. There were some truely incredible flights, including five Cert flights - L1 to Greg Rapp, L2 to Ron Dreasher, Justin Freeberg and Brian Keel and L3 to Eric Parsons - Congratulations. Other notable flights have to include Ken Reilly's Ten Pin's Revenge (now featured on Youtube), Bob Messner's Wolverine III, Tim Moore's Talon, the awesome debut of Road Runner motors and too many clusters to describe. Greg Rapp won the Viper in a random draw of all the cluster contestants. Class of motors used include A's=3, B's=13, C's=20, D's=1, E's=6, F's=8, G's=11, H's=6, I's=3, J's=8 and M's=1. Clusters are counted as one motor is this accounting. Flights are not posted necessarily in the order they flew as the flight cards have been shuffled and sorted by LCO's. Thanks to Art Hoag, Ken Plattner, Eric Parsons, Joe Hinton and to Warren Mussleman for calling most of the shots.

Weather Conditions

It was dead calm when the trailer arrived, towed out by Ed Dawson, who also stayed to help with range set up and then left without ever flying a rocket. Clear skies and a gentle breeze developed slowly, gusting to 15 mph at times on the ground and blowing harder aloft out of the north west. Probably reached into the fifties. Calm returned late into the afternoon and skies remained clear late into the dark. Celestial observation provided by John Wilke and fireside entertainment from Eric and Kyle Parsons and Dale Netherton.