With each CATO, the lesson can be hard, but knowledge is gained. Hopefully the CATOs will become a rare experience.

This was a nice, fast, flight that leapt out of sight into the clouds. "Elvis has left the building" as the LCO (Neil) put it.

On this flight, my handheld stopped receiving the homing beacon about the time it hit the ground. Fortunately, I had a general direction because, after the loss of the Cirrus Dart, I now try to get a general idea during its descent so I had a better idea for the cut-out scenario. After some while, I used the car to scout it out, and this turned out to be a wise idea. Despite the handheld/yagi not being able to hear the homing beacon, my mobile radio in the car could, it was very faint, but it could hear it; this let me play hot-and-cold. On hindsight, if I had realized this back in April, I might have been able to recover the Cirrus Dart too!

The lower section of this rocket came back in "kit form", but the fins were usuable and went into the new section during the repair.

And yes, my in-flight video is low resolution, a limitation by my camera.

A cool in-flight photo was taken by Scott Szympruch, which can be found here.

This is my first cluster, running three motors, it flew beautifully and landed rear end first.

Onboard video was highly successful for this (clearly) supersonic flight. It also turns out that the ditch system proved highly effective in ducting 70cm wavelengths, as the hunt of the rocket via the homing beacon lead to a very nice survey of the ditches in the area!

This was my Tripoli Level 2 Certification flight and was successful. It also happened to be my first supersonic rocket flight, but that fact eluded me for some time due to the details of the *next* flight.

The two pictures are of the residual smoke plume, from this launch, that lingered for several minutes before dissipating.

This rocket flew three times on the first day of this launch. As I was using electronics for the first time for deployment, this was flown a first time as a shake down flight. On this flight, the electronics didn't work due to a miswiring of the altimeter.

Peter Abresch took a nice 55s video here.

It tookoff beautifully, but the parachute failed to deploy. Lawn darted as it attempted to enter a lithospheric flight regime. (Damage rendered it unflyable.)

Also, it was discovered that the black nose cone was not a good spot to put the homing beacon on a summer day. Some of the solder on some of the components melted from the heat! This meant that the next two rockets were not using the homing beacon.

Went MIA for two months, recovered most of it, but enough damage rendered it unusable for future flights.