well dun my Friend it was a pleasure to go out tracking with you at 5.30 am

Well I got my L2 with a beautiful flight, though did have a problem with drift that required a 2 hike on Friday night followed by a 7 hour session Saturday morning (Up at 5:30am) searching, but got her back intact.

That's good news Keith, I am glad you liked it.
Please stay in touch and keep reading the site for news, photo's etc.


An announcement was made over the PA system by Liz the event manager informing people that Karl would be leaving early and to come get some food if you were hungry. I am sorry that you never heard the announcment and we  will make a note of this for future events.

Hi Mike

Thanks for your posting, the club finds this sort of thing very useful as it helps us understand how we have performed in the eyes of the visitor, those who do not have a background in rocket flying, that is. It will hopefully allow us to do better in future. I am also going to cover some additional points that others have asked about, hopefully this will help people understand why Range Safety Officer's RSO's (the folks in the Day-Glo jackets) do the things they do as well as answer your points.

Distances - In laying out the site there is one primary aim and that is safety - people and property. By its very nature hobby rocketry is potentially dangerous i.e. objects descending from the sky under chute or worse ballistically can cause damage. The club has had an instance in the past where a 75mm dia rocket drifted on its parachute a little further than expected and came down on a caravan punching a small hole in the roof, the rocket then fell off and the fins damaged a tent. Another club had an incident where a large rocket, under chute,  landed on a car windscreen and smashed it. There was a detailed plan of how to lay out the site drawn up before the event. A couple of us went over to start set up of the site on Thursday evening and found that the wind, a stiff breeze, was coming from an unusual direction and was predicted to do so through the weekend. This meant that the, fan shaped, predicted drop zone for recovering rockets covered the intended camp site. As a RSO I had no choice but to deviate from the intended plan and set out the camp site area to the right of the road and out of the predicted drop zone. It would have been irresponsible of me to do anything else! This did mean that the camp site was a little further from the Prep area/Flyer Reg/vendors/Toilets all of which were positioned as per the plan if a little further away from the flight line (20 meters ish) again this was done due to the expected wind direction. For those familiar with other launch sites the distance between the prep/tent area and the flight line is of the order of twice as far at UKRA. Its also worth noting that while I was considering what to do under the prevailing and expected conditions the land owner offered to allow us parking in the field immediately on the right after the entrance to the site!

More on the wind - For the dusk launches on Saturday evening we had a problem, in that, the wind had shifted in direction. The choices were abandon for the evening, shut the range and reposition all the launch equipment, unlikely to be completed in the time available (hindsight), allow the launches but move the crowd out of harms way as necessary. Based on the previous years experience when there were few launches it was decided to proceed and move the spectators. By the way the Safety Code states that all flyers and spectators should be standing for launches (if something does go wrong, like a rocket coming towards you and your sitting you cant get out of the way quickly. The dusk launch quickly turned into one of the busiest of the weekend and caused the RSO quite a headache. In fact the range was closed slightly ahead of time on Safety grounds and I suspect that at least one flyer was not happy with that decision! Allthough we are only just starting the wash up discussions amongst the club I am sure that next year the dusk launch will be conducted differently. I will be suggesting that during the Sat evening break we review the launch and specfically wind direction and if neccesary move launch equipment/spectator lines as appropriate, I will also be recomending that all rockets of non-conventional design be moved back to the HPR launch line.

Shade - You make an excellent point about shade. Last year the club went to considerable effort errecting additional gazebos in the vendor area. But we had nothing on the range, other than a fishing umbrella. All this equipment took a considerable time to take down on the Sunday evening. This year we put up a gazebo at the range head and one by the Flyer reg/prep Marquee. To be honest we had a further 2 off 3 x 3 and 1 off 9 x 3 Gazebos on site but did not erect them. From your comment and the comments of club members about the lack of tented communal area not providing a focal point for the event this is something we will be remidying for next year!

Glad you enjoyed the rocket launches and hope you havent been too badly put off. Next time, if there is one, bring a rocket or two and we will get you launching.

Regards

Mark

Just goes to show no matter how much time and effort is put into something you just can't please all the people all of the time.We all had the same heat and the same walk,and the children were all as hot as each other. The reason for the walking around was down to safety first.
At the end of the day a good time was had by all.
Regards

      Trevor

This was my first time at the event and we did enjoy the rockets and hope to return very soon and see some more and maybe join the club.

PS, could the food man stay longer next time, when we came down from the top field the food man had disappeared leaving us hungry!

Thanks for a good time.

Keith

I heard about this event from some friends of ours who fly rockets over Cambridge way and thought it would be nice if we could attend as we live closer to Tenbury Wells than Cambridge, also my kids would enjoy it as we have never been to Cambridge to see the rockets before.

Before the negative bits, we enjoyed (the kids especially) the rockets launching, with the smoke and loud roars.

A few points that may make your event run better are:-

We had to walk a long way from the car park to where you were flying the rockets from. A very difficult journey with a push chair. Especially if you wanted something to eat/drink you had to walk all the back to the car park nearly to the chap in the refreshment van, and then walk all the back to see the rockets. It was a hot day for walking.

There was no shade around the refreshment van at lunchtime. Why? We had to sit in the hot sun and eat and we were worried about the sun overheating the kids.

We stayed until 9pm on Saturday as we heard there were going to be some rockets going up in the dark, but it was very badly mismanged with the person in the yellow jacket kept moving everyone around. No sooner had we sat down with the kids with a few drinks and crisps we had to get up and move again and again. We left at this point disappointed and wishing we had not stayed for the night rockets.

We wish you all well and we hope that you may take our comments on board.

Mike

Currently L2 rocket sims to 5184 in rockst sim on a Pro 38 J330 motor, so Paul's 720 will be around this sort of region. Because of the drift will come down in the field behind us (which usually bulls in) I shall angle the flight over the northern ridgeline so there will be plenty of recovery space.

Still trying to lower the altitude a bit more, as it's my L2 attempt I just have to KISS and make sure the chute pops out OK.