Jules Verne 29 / G80 - 4
I spent most of today launching rockets and taking pictures of them. It was the annual launch for a summer class at the local university. It’s really a week long camp in which high school students learn about aeronautical engineering by designing, building, and flying boost gliders and egg lofters. At the end of the week the club sets up to let them actually fly and see how things go.
This year we set up early because the park district had some other sort of camp (I never did hear what kind) and asked the club to do a demonstration launch where we fly rockets for the amusement of the crowd. We did about 150 launches in 20 minutes which is a lot faster than our usual rate. Because it was a demonstration everyone had rockets prepared before the start so we could fill the rack, launch, then immediately fill again. I flew my Barracuda on an E30-4. It hadn’t been out for 4 or 5 years, but still flew very well. I had my JV-29 all wood rocket on the second rack on a G80-4 which went well from the audience’s point of view, although I think the delay was little short and chipped the top of the body tube a bit. I had taken the rocket out to show the crowd before the launch, making it nicer for them to see it fly. I brought it over to show a few of the kids as they left what it looked like after a flight. I think some of the kids found it interesting.
That was it for me flying, as I didn’t have time to prep anything else. The rest of the day (until about 6 PM) was helping with the camp students (over 40 of them, each launching a boost glider twice and an egg lofter once or twice). That went OK, athough the failure rate seemed higher than normal. One of the rocket guys remarked that we were teaching the wrong values, as the failure were far more exciting to the crowd than the successes. Still, even he had to admit that watching an instructor’s boost glider shed both wings on boost was funny.