JP Aerospace Blog

Another great story from Dale.

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If you’re in Northern California, check out ABC News 10 tonight. Dale Schornack joined us in the desert for Tandem and will be airing the story on the evening news. We don’t know if it will be on the 6pm or the 11pm newscast.

Dale’s stories usually get posted to station’s website shortly afterwards:

www.news10.net

Heavy lift Tandem launching a Mach Glider

Taken from the vehicle on it’s 18th touch down. MeToo launched with one balloon still attached at nearly neutral lift.

A hunter watched METoo land and MeToo watches him.    This is how we found her.

We got to METoo around 11pm. Kevin pulled down the remaining balloon and let the helium out. Perhaps we’ll fly that balloon on Meospheric Explorer Three.

The hunter called and left a message with us. He then tied MeToo off to a rock with the broken balloon line to keep her from flying away. She was still bobbing along up to ten feel off the ground. After he left METoo made one last flight moving twenty feet over to the the center of the road. Eight seconds later the backup balloon release activated. METoo was finally landed with the balloon now twenty feet away, fifty feet in the air still tied off to the burst balloon at the rock. Kevin and I just had an interesting time crawling up a wash in the dark try not to lose the truck in the stream when we got back on solid ground and rolled up to find METoo just waiting for up on the mountain top looking like she was ready to fly again.