One of my favorite hobbies is building and flying model rockets. I started in the sixties and continued into High School (Milton High in Alpharetta). I was doing some searching on the web in the late 90’s and got interested again, joined a local club (Southern Area Rocketry) and have been fairly active ever since.
A CATO is defined as:
A motor failure, generally explosive, where all the propellant is burned in a much shorter time than planned. This can be a nozzle blow-out (loud, but basically harmless), an end-cap blow-out (where all of the pyrotechnic force blows FORWARD which usually does a pretty good job of removing any internal structure including the recovery system) or a casing rupture which has unpredictable, but usually devastating, effects. Another form of CATO is an ejection failure caused by either the delay train failing to burn or the ejection charge not firing, but the result is the same: the model prangs. from the Model Rockets FAQ, by Wolfram von Kiparski
This was the CATO of an Estes C11-3 in my Estes Maniac. The rocket was not harmed. (2/1/20)
We also had some nice flights on February the 1st, 2020.
