Setting up to fly around sunrise this morning…
Winds were down this morning, as forecast. I have to admit, when I first got outside this morning I wasn’t nearly as excited as I should have been given the low winds. Instead of winds, we had freezing drizzle and fog, and if there is one thing that is harder to fly in than high winds, it’s this. The fog makes it impossible to see your plane, and the freezing drizzle results in ice buildup on some critical parts of your airplane, including the wings and the pitot sensor which provides information to the plane on how fast it’s flying. Fortunately, this condition lessened as the day went on, and over the course of the day, we got a very good round of flights in! This included several profiles up to around 200-300 meters altitude, some low altitude flights, and one very low (20 m) altitude flight over the newly formed sea ice surface designed to provide measurements on the energy exchange from the ocean below to the atmosphere above.
Doug piloting the aircraft from the beach. This allowed us to fly over some very new sea ice!
Guess we weren’t the only ones to have recently checked out the beach!
In total, we completed seven flights, and collected over 160 minutes of data! The next few days look to be similar to today, so there will be a lot of flying to do. For me, this means trying to get a good amount of rest because the next few days are sure to be tiring!
DataHawk 77 makes a late evening pass over the runway — the dashed light streak is the LED of the aircraft captured over an extended time period. We were orbiting at 20 m altitude when this photo was taken. The AMF is visible in the background on the right.
Great pictures! Those are big paw prints!