Our first Sport Scale competition. . .

Jess and I left Saturday morning at 4 am and arrived around 10:30 at the launch field. After turning in our scale models, I made a futile attempt at flying a helicopter model–shredded at ejection. Sport Scale static judging was finished by Saturday evening, and out of 16 C Division entries, my Black Brant XII was in first place, Steve Foster’s large Nike-Apache was in second, and Jess’s Iris was in third place. A nice-looking Jayhawk by Rod Schafer was fourth, and Chris Kidwell’s Redstone-like WRESAT was fifth.

Sunday morning was a little breezy, but we managed to fly without difficulty. Steve Foster attempted staging his Nike-Apache to acquire mission points, but without success. I flew my Black Brant XII single stage because of booster recovery problems encountered during staged flight at the Mick Wilkins Meet in April. It was a perfect flight and recovery on a D12-3. Jess flew the Iris, with perfect staging and a small recovery problem; the parachute for the bottom half of her upper stage didn’t deploy, but the RSO qualified the flight anyway. The result was two broken-off fins. Steve Foster later completed a second flight with successful staging, giving him enough mission points for first place (5 point lead). Darn those mission points! The Black Brant XII and Iris ended up second and third, respectively. Not bad for our first competition against several competitors.  You can see other contest results from that launch here.

Launch photos courtesy of Chris Kidwell