Plaster City April '12 launch report

I'll cease adding 'belated' as you're more than smart enough to deduce perpetual tardiness on my part.  In general I lag on these updates because I want the video to appear polished so that's the bottleneck.  In the future, if I have time, I'll add accouterment. Otherwise I'll prioritize swift posting over video rigor.
     Secondly... 10 months after being promoted to TAP I signed off on my first L3!!  Paul Breed successfully attained L3 cert on his first try after a beautiful Madcow DX3 Massive flight.  Congratulations, Paul!


After that month's launch I had posted a private draft of my flight for a few folks.  I just made that public so here's the unabridged, unedited onboard video from my largest Skidmark flight to date: the Pro75 5G CTI 4828L1410 (available in glorious 720p when viewed on YouTube):

My buddy Megan attended her first launch that day and did an amazing job of shooting photos thus freeing me up to prep instead.  Her shutter timing astounds me and often she would click off a single frame, nailing it first try, and not even needing the 10 frames per second available to her:

I've been using my new 3DConnexion Space Navigator mouse to peruse GPS flight data and Google Earth in general.  They're only $91 on Amazon so you should immediately ditch this silly blog and procure one post haste!

Elevation and pitch always seemed coupled in Google Earth but the 3D mouse made quick work of separating them as seen in this M840 vs. L1410 comparison:

The two altimeters averaged 11,903' AGL (barometric) and the Beeline GPS peaked at 12,383' so I'm gonna call it 12,000+.

Raven data - graph, tabular
ARTS2 data - graph, tabular, motor performance (5043L1424), CD analysis

Again, thanks to Megan's help, I was able to get to a second flight in that day!  Darrell had built an AT J1799 (a reworked J1999) Warp9 for me the month before but I was unable to get my aging BlackSky AltACC2C working reliably in my otherwise stalwart Loc 7.5" V2 and had to scratch the flight.  In the interim I built a drop-in board featuring the Featherweight Power Perch for my new Raven2.
     The flight was fast and perfect with easy, proximal recovery.  I could not have shot this better myself!:


Raven2 data - graph, tabular

I only hit 2485' but damn that was a swift ascent!  (Check out the the slope of the velocity curve in the graph link above.)  Warp9 motors have proven unreliable for some but I've never had issues.  I still have a K1499 and K1999 in my motor box so... gotta get those lit!