July 19th saw a banner day of flying at the North Site during NCR's two day Research Launch. Using our 35K call-in windows for the first time, a number of notable flights were made, in particlular John Wilke's flight of Casey Mae on a Kosdon by Aerotech M1450 to bring in the first flight at an NCR launch to break 30,000' AGL by turning in an altitude of 30,168' and a new all-time North Site altitude record.

In addition several other folks made serious altitude attempts; John Wilke, Jim Amos, John Bixler and Ed Dawson all made flights that would break our normal 20K waiver. John set a new club K altitude record with BenchmarK on a Loki K350 by flying to 23,949' AGL. Jim had a successful flight of his Mother of All Krockets to over 23,500' on a Research AN motor. John Bixler and Junior flew to 21,785'also on the Loki K350 and even held the club K record, though for less than a day. Ed Dawson made an attempt to break 30,000' with his bird Double Sixes but suffered a catastrophic airframe failure at burnout when flying his beautiful carbon bird on an Aerotech M650.

Besides all the altitude attempts, there were quite a few other flights including a very impressive flight of Doug Gerard's Freeze Frame on a central N2800 with two drop-off K700 boosters. Saturday Night at the Movies was a big hit with Doug's extensive collection of both in-flight and ground based high speed films - we even had a popcorn machine (thanks Doug!). For those of you who were there - thanks for coming and making this NCR's best Research Launch ever. For those that missed it - well, you missed one heck of a great launch. Perfect weather, dead calm winds for most of Saturday and Sunday and perfect blue skies. See ya' next time!

Logs are posted. If Joe screwed up or didn't include pertinent info, send it to me or him and we'll get it corrected.