"First, I think it is funny as hell how the Estes R&D guy saw your rocket bust. I am glad the Cineroc is OK. The reason the film is not thru is that it is too short a time. The film I would bet still has well over 1/2 unused--so fly that same film pak again on a single stage. I hope you complete the Mountaineer III soon so you can fly it for me.
I have no recollection of this flight incident, but I apparently described it in one of my letters to Maryland.
To my dismay, I no longer possess any flight logs or records spanning from March, 1978 through all of 1979. Either I didn't keep the logs in the first place, or, somewhere along the line, I lost whatever notebook they might have resided in, so I have no way to corroborate this particular flight.
Anyway, this letter implied that I, indeed had another Omega rocket (Mountaineer II?) with which to continue flying Cinerocs for Herb after I had lost the original Mountaineer at Breckenridge. I did not remember whether Herb built this one and mailed it to me or if I built it myself.
This last weekend, I scoured through all of my old-fleet model rocketry photo albums, scrapbooks, and issues of the Cosmic Steppingstone newsletter to see if I could find anything at all about this flight.
To my surprise, I certainly did!
In the August/September 1978 issue of the newsletter, I found a write-up about a competition / demonstration meet that took place in July1978 at Penrose Stadium in Colorado Springs. At the time, Skywatchers/ROMAR had ceased being a section of the NAR, so this event was a non-sanctioned contest. The article says that several rocketeers drove down from Denver to participate.
Here is the news letter article excerpt that is pertinent to this post:
"About this time, the clouds burned off and the weather was turning hot, so Ed Mitton decided to prepare his Cineroc movie camera for flight. When everything was ready, the countdown was started and the camera switched on. The engine in the booster happened to be one of those that Estes makes once in awhile just for fun...it exploded! The force of the blast threw the Cineroc 20 feet into the air from which it free-fell. Luckily it was not damaged."
A little further in the write-up:
As if that weren't enough, some club members had the nerve to suggest launching some more rockets for the benefit of having FUN ! PREPOSTEROUS! One of the perpetrators of this outrage, Ed Mitton, launched his now very worn Cineroc booster (with static payload section in place of the Cineroc -ed) to test out another of the D12-5 engines from the same pack that nearly caused the demise of his Cineroc. True to Murphy's Law, the flight went perfectly!"
And another interesting line at the end of the article:
"There were a moderate number of spectators during the course of the meet, including the distinguished Wayne Kellner, one of them fancy R&D guys from Estes."
When scanning through flight logs for early 1978, I found also this footnote to a February 5th Skywatchers sport meet:
"Besides flying my own models, I launched Herb Desind's Cineroc model for a very nice flight."
Also, while looking through my old photo album I found two interesting prints:
Since I designed and constructed those particular display boards, I am 100% sure that this rocket is the Mountaineer II ! The very same model described in Herb's letter and the news letter article. The odd thing is I still possess lists of all the models in my old fleet, but this Omega is not mentioned. Mysterious. That leads me to believe that the model was actually built by Herb, otherwise it would have been recorded in my rocket list along with an assigned fleet number.
Another little gem I found while researching in the ol' model rocket archives is this:
Probably acquired from Wayne at that 1978 rocketry event.
Gee, wonder if the phone number is still any good.....
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