Message from the President : Safety First
By Trip Barber, NAR 4322
NAR President
Our hobby and our organization were founded fifty-one years ago to address a safety problem. It was the year of Sputnik and people across America with more enthusiasm for rockets than knowledge of them were doing unsafe things with homemade rockets and getting killed in the process. Then the early model rocket industry began offering safe products to consumers and the NAR came on the scene with a safety code for how to fly them. Over five hundred million flights later, we can still say that no one has ever been killed flying a rocket of the types we fly. The NAR has earned a reputation with public safety officials across the U.S. as a safety-oriented consumer organization with codes that they can trust, and whose members self-regulate and follow these codes. This reputation and record get us good insurance at good prices, access to launch sites and youth programs, and a reasonably strong position for our hobby in the regulatory and legal environment (current lawsuit with BATFE aside).
Safety is not automatic. It takes the personal attention of each flier and each Range Safety Officer to make it happen, every time. A bad accident – a major fire or property damage event, or a death from a rocket flight – would change everything about our hobby’s standing with authorities and our reputation as an organization. We must all work to keep such an event from ever happening; the duty of safety must always supersede the eagerness to fly. If a flight cannot be made safely, then it must not be made at all. Our Safety Codes for model rockets and for high power rockets were developed through many years of experience and careful analysis, and each rule in them is there for a good reason. Following these codes every time each of us flies, and insisting that others around us do the same, is the necessary first step for ensuring safety and protecting our hobby.
In 2005 the NAR conducted a comprehensive study of hobby rocket flight safety, which is posted in our website’s “Safety Information” section. This study, led by Dr. Jay Apt – former NAR Trustee and NASA astronaut -- used data from over 6,000 rocket flights to identify recurring safety issues. It told us that recovery malfunctions are by far our most common and most dangerous safety problems. The key concern here is “kinetic energy”, the energy that a rocket’s weight has when coming down from the sky at significant speed. This energy is applied suddenly at impact to whatever the rocket hits, and if this is a person or valuable property the result is going to be very bad. Even small model rockets, if moving at high speed, can cause injury or damage. Large rockets, even if landing slowly with a deployed parachute, have enough energy due to their weight to do the same.
It is critical to safety that we manage the trajectories of our rockets so that if they “lawn dart” due to complete recovery failure, or when they land by parachute at the end of a normal flight, both occur far away from people or cars and tents. Generally all this takes is a little tilt downrange on the launcher, and careful positioning of the range so that spectators and parking are crosswind from the launch pads. If your rockets are regularly arcing over spectators’ heads during boost, or landing amidst them on recovery, it is time to stop and change things so that neither of these continues to happen and the rockets’ kinetic energy is applied only to the ground.
A second major safety concern is fire around the launch pads. Any rocket motor produces hot gases and particles at ignition – some more than others – and these will start fires in dry vegetation if they hit it. In windy weather such fires can very quickly get out of control and result in major property damage, usually followed by an insurance claim and loss of a launch site. The goal is not to let hot particles hit dry vegetation at any launch, and to be prepared with the proper vigilance and ready firefighting equipment to fight a fire immediately and effectively if one starts. Proper use of blast deflectors and fireproof ground blankets, clearing dry vegetation around pads to the distances required by the safety codes, and soaking any dry vegetation that remains before flying are all much simpler and cheaper steps than dealing with a field conflagration.
Our safety record and our reputation for self-enforcement of our Safety Codes are the NAR’s most valuable assets. Please help preserve the future of our organization and our hobby by flying safely, every time you fly, and by helping others around you, even if they are not NAR members, to do the same.