Flight

First flight was back in 2009 at good ol' VOA Park outside of Cincinnati.  Big field, so I loaded it with a C6-5 and let it rip.  Rip is just what it did.  Great altitude with major windcocking, but as is generally the case, a short recovery walk due to the Saki riding the breeze back to us.

Three years passed before the next flight, an ill advised A8-3 flight at B6-4 Field in Fort Thomas.  I say ill-advised because the Saki is fairly hefty for a small bird, with a lot of built in nose weight.  The A8-3 flight struggled off the pad and began a lethargic arch back toward the ground.  Parachute fired 20 feet from the ground, but the rocket recovered with no damage.

Eight years passed before the next flight when it became flight #199 in my quest for 200 flights in 2020.  (It had made trips to the field since then, but had not flown for one reason or another.)  Flight #199 was at the Wright Stuff Rocketeers cornfield in Cedarville, OH, a field big enough to plug in a C6-5 without any qualms.  The flight windcocked left, as had everything on the day, topping out around 500 feet.  It then rode the breeze back across the pads and landed rather violently in the cornfield to our left.  I figured it had just cracked another fin, and turned my attention back to an original Estes Pershing 1-A that was about to fly.  When that was photographed, I walked into the field to recover the Saki, only to find it in five or six pieces.  It had apparently hit hard on one of the large, dry dirt clods, and took off the whole right side of the rocket.  I gathered up the pieces and tried to rebuild things Frankenstein-style, but I evidently missed a piece and eventually just ordered another set of find from Semroc.  The top wing is no longer yellow, and probably won't be at this point.