Tri-Cities Rocketeers May 2018

Heads up for May 2018 launch, due to bad flying weather in April, we have decided to make May a 1.5 day event, we will set up for FAR 101 flying on Friday about noon-ish, fly our normal HPR waiver on Saturday, and maybe if we get enough assistance (aka folks willing to stay Saturday night as well, and assist with take down of the range on Sunday, otherwise the range will be taken down Saturday evening) we can fly half a day on Sunday. Night flights will be available on Friday night (and Saturday if the half day Sunday happens), however the night flights will be FAR 101 only.

Launch dates so far are May 11-12 (with a possibility of Sunday the 13th).

Would love to. But I will be helping at the TARC finals that weekend.

I should be able to stay and help providing it finally quits snowing in the pass so I can get there.lol. I have a lot of stuff I would like to fly including a shake down for my L3 project.

Gary Bade

Its official that we will make the May launch a two day event with the possibility of 3 (with enough volunteers to help take down the range on Sunday).

Sun River Observatories' Bob G. will be onsite as a vendor for the launch, so we will have at least one motor and kit vendor.

Hopefully the weather cooperates.

It will also be the debut of our new LPR pads at a club launch!

Rich, those pads are sweet. Well Done!

Would love to go but I'm using my weekend pass for the month at FITS. I have put in with work to get June Swoosh off and am crossing all fingers and toes to be there for that one.

All righty then! We are less than a week out now for this months launch and the weather forecast is looking great. Tomorrow night is the clubs monthly meeting (Bobs Burgers and Brews off Queensgate in Richland, WA) at 6pm, at that time we will make final plans for the weekend and a general call for continuing the countdown or to go into a weather hold. For now we are T-4 days and counting.

I can't make the meeting tomorrow due to a work trip to Seattle. Current plan is to arrive at the Sod farm around lunchtime on saturday depending on how my morning work commitment runs. Can't wait to launch a rocket or three. it's been a while!

As of last nights club meeting the launch is a go currently for Friday (FAR101 only) and Saturday (everything else), Sunday is dependent on having enough volunteers to help Dave and William take down the GSE (my wife would kill me for not being home on Mothers Day). Stay tuned here and to our forum page for updates or last minute changes.

Thanks to the good weather, our May Friday/Saturday launch was a big success. The wind predicted for Saturday didn’t materialize until late in the day, making for perfect flying conditions from the opening of the waiver with beautiful blue skies. At the end of the day, we had a total of 107 amazing flights, with a ton of them HPR. The motor breakdown for Friday/Saturday was as follows:

A: 13
B: 9
C: 13
D: 9
E: 8
F: 23
G: 17
H: 13
I: 6
J: 2
K: 1

We had a successful L1 and then L2 certification flight – congratulations Chris and welcome to Level 2! Bob Grossfeld from Sun River Nature Center was on Site Saturday selling everything rockets, just like old times. We even had our club founder Derek and his son join us on Saturday to log a total of 9 flights. Welcome back! It was also great to see Steve P. back to punch up his well flown Goblin.

Jim P. tied Larry K. for the frequent flier award with 13 flights, with several other fliers coming in close second. Good times around the campfire made for a relaxing end to a hard day of flying.

Special thanks to all the help we received with setting up and tearing down – many hands truly makes for light work. Also a million thanks to Larry and Jim for taking a shift at LCO duty. Being short-handed, that made a huge difference and allowed us club officers to fly.

Also thanks so much for your generous donations to our Lewis & Clark science club fund raiser, as well as to our club. Thanks to you, we continue to improve our GSE. See you at our next launch.


Dave K.