Eagle Hill Students Blast Off

The afternoon couldn't have gone better for students from Eagle Hill School in Fairfield's Southport neighborhood.

Not only did this morning's rain give way to a blue sky, but each of the 10 rockets Eagle Hill students built at the Fairfield Fire Training Center on One Rod Highway fired into the sky.

Jim DiPreta, an Eagle Hill parent who helped students assemble the Estes Flying Model Rockets, led the countdown in the training center's parking lot, and the rockets fired so quickly into the sky that they immediately were lost to the naked eye.

Jeffry Spahr, an Eagle Hill parent who got the idea for this afternoon's rocket launch and who also helped students build the rockets, said the rockets reached a height of 800 feet to 1,000 feet before they descended.

"Our school is a great school, and one of the things I wanted to promote was after-school activities for kids," Spahr said. "I'm trying to supplement the programs Eagle Hill has. I think a lot of the kids, when they heard it was going to be rockets, there was an enthusiastic response."

Spahr said he liked the idea of building and firing rockets because the students could work on a project and see the result of their work in one afternoon.

Eve Grassie, 8, said she fired a rocket into the sky before at Winslow Park in Westport with her brother and that she was having a good time building her rocket in the Fairfield Fire Training Center's classroom. "It looks quite fun, and I like to build stuff. Flying stuff is really interesting to me," she said.

Graham Reichhelm, 8, didn't have trouble building his rocket and had finished before a lot of his classmates. But Graham said he and his dad built four rockets in the past and also build model airplanes together.

Graham said he likes building flying rockets as much as launching them. "The last four models I made had white parachutes with strings so it slows it down before it comes to a halt on land," he said.

Riley Pengue, 10, said he built four rockets in the past and this also was the first one he built that didn't have a parachute. "It's like a crash landing," he said.

Spahr said the rockets launched this afternoon didn't have parachutes because this afternoon's steady breeze might cause the rockets to drift too far from the training center.

Evan Lipset, 9, said he liked launching rockets more than building them. "It's harder to build them," he said.

The students built the rockets in the training center's classroom from about 1 p.m. to 2:30 p.m., including time for a pizza lunch and brownies, and then headed out to the parking lot to launch them.

DiPreta made sure students stood away from the rocket to be launched, led the countdown and showed each student the button that needed to be pressed to fire the rockets into the sky.

Each of the 10 launches was successful, and the rockets quickly disappeared into the sky before they could be spotted by a trail of smoke. Students then chased after the rockets after they landed 30 to 40 feet away.

Spahr said he hopes to have another rocket launch in the fall. "This is obviously all for the kids," he said.