♪
>>All right... Good morning everybody.
Roll call... Got the pilot, got the co-pilot...
GHOC operator... Mission Director...
All right! Flight mission crew, FCIFs are complete
and flight currencies are all checked.
Crew schedule has been published...
We are NASA872.
Engine start expecting 0600,
estimated landing 07 tomorrow morning,
so the mission duration is approximately 24.
All right... Thanks everybody!
♪
>>Hawks are strong, powerful birds
capable of flying thousands of miles each year.
Some species undertake long migrational journeys,
a testimony to their strength and stamina.
Our bird will fly over 10,000 nautical miles
and will reach an altitude of 65,000 feet.
>>The preparation for an ATTREX flight
starts a couple of days before the flight
when we get together and look at the meteorological forecasts
and decide where to send the aircraft.
>>Those targets are determined by the circulation
of the atmosphere which varies from day to day.
>>So we design a flight based on meteorological data
to go down and sample near the tropical tropopause,
so what altitude to sample.
Also what latitude and longitude to sample.
>>We're looking at all the areas where the scientists want to fly
and we coordinate those areas
with the Federal Aviation Administration.
>>We work with the scientists beginning at that time
to come up with options and a plan to get them what they need.
We try to maximize the time that we spend in the air.
>>For this experiment we were focused on regions
where temperatures are cold,
because we're interested in high altitude clouds.
These clouds are about 10 miles or 16 km above the surface.
>>When all the instruments are ready for flight
and everything has been checked out,
the aircraft has been checked out,
we button up all the hatches and we're ready for flight.
[Radio chatter]
>>Once everything is ready in the control room
we give the “OK” for engine start.
[Radio chatter]
♪
>>We fly with a mouse and keyboard
and it's more like flying an airline
that's always on autopilot.
>>With the Global Hawk we have the same controls
only we're just on the ground
and the aircraft could be several thousand miles away.
>>Rather than pointing the nose in any given direction
or setting a throttle for a particular power setting
we just tell the aircraft go to this heading,
go to this altitude, go to this airspeed...
the system itself decides on the best way to get there.
>>And one of our challenges is to understand the contingency state
that the aircraft is in
and make sure we understand what the aircraft is doing
and that's what we truly want the aircraft to do.
>>Most of the time the aircraft is flying
in what we call a “cruise climb mode”.
It's actually full throttle, in a climb,
it gets up to a maximum altitude
and then it has to wait to burn fuel off and,
as the aircraft gets lighter, it goes a little bit higher...
and a little bit higher...
up to a maximum ceiling of about 65,000 feet.
[Radio chatter]
>>One of the things we do during these flights is
we have a meteorological team of forecasters down the hall,
who are watching the satellite products
and telling us where thunderstorms are for example...
>>There might be colder temperatures south of Hawaii
versus just off the coast of South America...
or Central America...
So we have to know where to direct the plane.
So we look very carefully at the meteorological situation first.
Then when they're in the air and you're flying along,
often times these forecasts are wrong.
>>When the atmospheric conditions change during the flight
when we're out over the ocean,
a lot of times there's a request
for us to change our flight track.
Maybe the air that they are interested in
is in a different area.
So, one of the things that we will do
is coordinate that flight change.
>>We will use the information we're collecting
as we fly along to redirect the plane.
>>If you notice, up in that forward deck of the airplane,
there's a big white 48 inch dish.
That's a KU, a commercial KU SatCom dish,
and that is constantly pointing at the satellite
that we have subscribed to for the missions.
>>We actually get extensive data transmission
from what the instruments are measuring in flight.
>>We decide, based on what we see,
to send the aircraft somewhere else
or to have it go down to different altitudes.
>>The classic case, as I said, as you look down
you see a cloud on the LIDAR and you say "we're gonna turn around
descend into that cloud, and sample it."
>>So we'll profile down, through these thin clouds,
making measurements of not only water vapor,
but the temperature, and the pressure
and a range of other gases including ozone,
chlorofluorocarbons and so forth.
So that we can understand the movement of air
and the behavior of the air in that layer as we dive down.
>>One of the great things about this is
being that our ground station is building-based,
we have all the scientists in the back room.
We always fly with two pilots.
This gives us the opportunity for one pilot,
the mission commander, to get up, go to the back room
leave the other guy to monitor the airplane
and we can talk with any one of the particular scientists,
whoever has the most important data that they want to get
at that particular time.
We can work directly with that scientist,
sit right down at the table with him or her,
and decide what's the best way to get them what they want
and still meet everybody else's needs.
>>Obviously, the pilots fly the plane
they're the ones who are talking to ground control,
but the pilot has to know where to go
and that's where the scientists' role comes in.
The scientists will pick the targets
and direct the plane towards the appropriate targets.
Both, before we fly, and while we are flying.
>>It's quite a process because, sometimes,
it can mean a major shift in the flight track.
We'll look at what they propose and provide some feedback.
And then we have to talk to Air Traffic Control
to make sure that what we're proposing is okay with them.
So we will change the flight track,
sometimes many times, during the flight.
>>And so that's how we coordinate between
the flight operations team and the payload operations team.
So it's a very close collaboration during a flight
between both groups.
>>Very interesting for me too, because,
coming from a platform where we would just have instruments
loaded on the plane and we just go fly a mission,
we get real time interaction with the scientists.
And I've learned a whole lot
just in the few years I've been doing this
on what's going on in the back end of the airplane.
Very exciting and very interesting.
[Radio chatter]
>>Well... What next and what's important to do?
>>We hope that ATTREX will improve our understanding
of this part of the atmosphere,
but ultimately ATTREX will raise
some additional questions as well.
>>We have a lot of work to go
and we hope that doing ATTREX with multiple missions,
different times of the year, in different parts of,
mostly over the Pacific but into the Indian Ocean,
to fully understand the range of conditions that we'll see
that models have to consider all of those ranges of conditions
in order to understand the climate system properly.
>>We need to develop some more instruments
and fly them on the Global Hawk and other high-altitude aircaft
to make measurements there as well
>>Emily Dickinson once wrote:
“The brain is wider than the sky”
Many questions have been addressed along the way
and new ones have surfaced
We'll keep searching, for the answer
is in the air...