OK, my TARC team (well, the one I was observing for) had done some flight testing last weekend and wound up with some respectable times using F22-5 RMS motors from Aerotech.

There best time during flight tests last weekend were 38.4 sec and 749'. The rest of the test flights were very consistant and all resulted in less than a 10 or 15 point score. Very impressive!

Unfortunately I wasn't there so the those test flights weren't recorded so this information was basically hearsay.

Yesterday the winds were light (5 to 7mph) it was sunny and about 50 degrees. Perfect flying weather!

Here's the problem.

They made 5 flights using the same batch of F22-5 motors but honestly, I think something was wrong.

The flights all seemed to weather cock badly (two eggs in the nose is a lot of weight!) in fairly light winds. all flights arced over into the wind. Like they had weaker thrust than normal.

Maximum altitude out of 5 flights was 618' but most were in the 300 to 400" range.

The bad parts were the delays. The F22-5's all seem to have closer to 8 to 10sec delays. All heart stopping flights with deployment at close to terminal velocity and altitudes of 100 to 200'.

They tried a shorter 3 sec delay (that came with the reloads) and wound up with ejection at 8 seconds after burnout.

I can verify this because I had the stopwatch.

My question is, why all the bonus delays?

Any ideas?

They didn't appear to be doing anything differently when assembling the RMS motors.
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