Red Glare X
April 2011
/ Higgs Farm
1 flight, 5800 N-sec burned
Red Glare is the premier launch on the east coast every fall and spring, and I always look forward to heading to the eastern shore of Maryland to hang out with Todd, Ryan, Darren, Al, Gary, and the rest of the MDRA crew. Tim Lehr of Wildman Rocketry was nice enough to let me put my rocket stuff in his motorhome, so all I had to do was hop on the plane and head to the launch. Though the weather wasn't the greatest, there were still tons of great flights, from Burl's gigantic V2 making its straightest flight yet, to the Mega Darkstar on a full CTI O motor, to Todd's most excellent UltraViolet cluster flight, to Heller's fuchsia O motor, to the return of JerryO's awesome Iris on a big 114mm N. A great weekend of flying!
Todd wanted to put up Shake Weight again on a cluster of UltraViolet, but he wanted to make sure that the 6000 version of the motor (which had never been fired before) would hold together. I volunteered my Competitor, figuring that the success of a 10k load back in November augured well for a good flight. As soon as the weather cleared enough to allow high altitude flights, Bob Utley called in the waiver to its full extent, and I was the first one to try and use it. Crazy Jim gave me a motor initiator to use as a test (look for the "middle-un", coming soon). Todd, Ryan, and Andrew helped me load her up on the pad, and Neil pushed the button. The Competitor ROCKED off the rail, pulling 52 Gs on its way to over 14,000 feet. After the flight, me, Todd, Ryan, and Andrew took a few minutes to pick our jaws back up off the ground before looking over to the GPS system; just as the rocket came back through 1000 feet, we picked up a visual on it due north of the flying site. Main deployment was on time and recovery was easy 0.6 miles from Todd's car on the flight line.
