Launch Report for April 20th, 1987
(Written on Thursday, December 10th, 1998, based on flight logs from that time.)

My friend Dan & I went out to a field beyond the dead end part of Olivier, between Trudeau and Forest here in Chateauguay, Quebec, Canada to send up Aurora which at the time was my highest powered and highest flying rocket.   Visibility was excellent and it was sunny and about 26 degrees Celcius.

Flight 92, 1st flight this year
Scratch built Aurora on a Flight Systems Inc. F7-4 for its 1st flight
On one of Aurora's two 48 inch streamers, I wrote a message on it asking whoever found this rocket to please remove the nose cone from the payload section and read the note inside.  In its payload section, I put a note asking whoever found the rocket to give me a call so that I could come over to pick up the rocket and to pay a five dollar reward that I had offered.  I had a lot of trouble getting Aurora into the air that day because the upper launch lug kept breaking off and it wasn't until about an hour and a half after I got to the launch site that Aurora finally flew.

This was a flight to remember!  It was my first use of a Flight Systems motor and it was my first use of a motor more powerful than a "D".  What a step up!!  Aurora flew completely out of sight and my friend Dan & I could still hear the motor burning since F7's have a burn time of nine seconds.  In fact, my mother heard and saw Aurora's flight from about a third of a mile away.  Aurora's not a huge rocket, but it definitely got noticed.  I had a feeling that this motor was going to be loud, so I used my old Estes Challenger 1 launch controller to which I had added an extra 20 feet of wire to give a total length of 30 feet.  This was my first time using this controller with the modification and it worked perfectly.  The motor was louder from over thirty feet away as a typical 18mm motor from ten feet away. 

The rocket was found by a bunch of excited kids that saw it bounce off the roof of a parked car about a quarter of a mile away.  There was no damage to the car, but I'm guessing that the fins broke when it landed on it.  It was by sheer luck that Dan & I met these kids while looking for the rocket.  They found the note in the payload section and I paid the reward.

Questions? Comments? Suggestions? Just to say Hi?

E-mail: kbedard@rocketryonline.com

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