not wanting to second guess, over step someones decision, I respect Joe and Pat and have known them a long time. I was not part of the cert team and did not see the flight but because this has been such an issue I did some reading and thought I would make one last comment

the scenario was discussed with TRA's VP and he did not want to second guess or did not fell what Joe did was out of line.

I did read TRA's cert info, I will let you all read it and make your own conclusions.

please read both links below and pay attention to the description of a safe flight out lined in the L1 cert and then read the L2 cert. it does not go into detail but uses the same working "safe flight"

http://tripoli.org/cert/howto_level1.shtml

http://tripoli.org/cert/howto_level2.shtml

NAR has a very similar wording:

5. The individual will fly his model. The flight must be witnessed by the certification team members. Stability, deployment of the recovery system, and safe recovery should be considered when evaluating safety of the flight. Models experiencing a catastrophic failure of the airframe, rocket motor, and/or recovery system (e.g., shock cord separation) will not be considered as having a safe flight.

Mike I think you are doing the right thing by re-flying do to the controversy this has started.

Mike, it is wise to re-fly. Once that is done, the question will have been resolved.

You, bet. I'll want to burn a few other motors as well.

Do you happen to have an extra piece of 5" coupler from PR that I can use to make a zipperless design on my L3? If not I'll order a piece from Curtis.

I'm also looking for some 4-6 oz carbon kevlar cloth. Did anyone buy too much?

This thread is starting to get a bit long and has wandered a bit from its original purpose. I'm going to lock it and ask Mike to start another one with a more appropriate topic title if he wants to continue it. Personally I'd like to see him post something more about his GPS system and the telemetry downlink. I think a bunch of other folks are interested in that too.

By the way, when I cut off threads at 4 or 5 pages, it is due to technical reasons. The forum software here on the site can exhibit a nasty little bug on longer threads that can corrupt the database. It's a pain to fix. If folks want to continue with this thread, just start a new one with the same name and add Part II.

Warren