My Level 3 certification flight at Airfest XXI in Argonia, KS.  I had grand plans for my first trip to Argonia, which included my L3 cert and many other awesome flights over the full four days of the launch.  Reality and my deliberate approach to building my L3 bird conspired to ruin those plans.  The short version of the story is that by the time I arrived in Argonia, the Frenzy XL was only about 40% complete.  I spent the first three days of the launch in my hotel room completely consumed with finishing the build.  I made a trip out to the field late Sunday to get some help setting up my RRC3 altimeter and then went back to the hotel to build the motor and get some sleep.  Back to the field Monday morning, still quite a few folks around but I'm sure much less than the weekend crowd.  Got my paperwork in order, went through the RSO checks and headed out to the pads.  Rocket prep on the pad was smooth and we headed back to the flight line, with nothing left to do but wait for the countdown.  The motor lit right away and "The Trout" roared off the pad and was quickly out of sight.  Standing on the line with the tracker trying to get a good fix, I had a strong signal but couldn't get a good directional fix.  Right about the time it dawned on me that the rocket must be right over my head, I heard the main charge go off and looked up to see the main chute deploy perfectly.  Rocket landed in the grass near the end of the line, probably 150 yards away from where I was standing.  Post flight inspection revealed no issues and the cert was in the bag.  In hindsight it was probably fortunate that I hadn't flown on the weekend since the spot where I landed was the overflow parking, but things worked out for the best.  After the excitement wore off I briefly considered prepping more rockets to fly, but the weight of the entire weekend finally caught up with me and I decided to just hang out and watch some flights before packing up and heading home.  Now it just needs a paint job.

Data form the altimeters is as follows:  Rocksim preflight simulation predicted 15,508 ft.  Rocket weighed 14lbs 13oz prepped for flight without the motor, and 27lbs 13oz on the pad.  The Perfectflight Stratologger CF reported apogee at 15,497 ft, and the Missileworks RRC3 reported apogee at 15,490 ft, with a max velocity of 1595fps at 5624 ft with a temp of 101.3F, which translates into 1.37M.