Ambient hangar sounds
it to back it up just a little bit toward you, okay?
All right.
And then we're
I'm going to gloss over all the paperwork.
Okay.
All right, let's go.
Stan. Wow.
Ready Mike?
Yeah.
would probably come up a little bit.
A little bit.
Watch those pins. Yeah. Yeah.
Almost there... beautiful
Let's do this.
You got a 9/16ths?
Yeah.
beautiful!
There on the left.
Coming down
Go ahead and close up.
1128.
Okay. Go ahead
but occasionally thunderstorms produce
what's called an overshooting cloud top,
so it's normally an anvil cloud is very flat on top
and overshooting
cloud top is when you get some particles
that actually shoot out through that.
And you'll see just like on a
on a satellite image or something,
you'll see just a little bit of it sticks out above it.
And that is an ejection that this campaign is looking to see.
What is that made up of?
Like what are the chemical compositions in there
and how far are they getting into the atmosphere?
Because the higher particles get into the atmosphere,
the more they go around the globe more frequently. Right.
So if it's something in the the troposphere, it's a
smaller system, it develops, it dissipates, it's done.
If you get more into the higher
altitudes, then it starts circul
The aircraft
itself has multiple locations that instruments can go into.
We have the nose pod.
We have the two super pods on the wings.
We have the cube, which is behind the cockpit.
And we also have a
the center line pod,
which is the
a pod that just hangs off the belly of the aircraft.
So all of those have different configurations.
The instruments are adapted onto a rack
that fits very snugly
into the various locations that they're going to go into.
And then the crew
make sure that all of that is in there correctly.
Our inspectors
make sure that everything is done
and there's nothing in the way with their what their various
hose lines, electrical lines and so forth.
And then they are the pods themselves
when we're integrating our on a car.
So they start them out and then they actually
connect them to the aircraft.
And that's the final bit before we go fly
And the reason we chose Salina,
Kansas, is it's centrally located in the United States.
Where we can reach out to just about anywhere in the USA.
But specifically, we're after thunderstorms.
And as we know, the Midwest, Kansas, Texas,
North Dakota, South Dakota, all of that is heavily
influenced by thunderstorms in the summertime.
And so that's why we're deploying to Kansas in
the summer is to go hunt these thunderstorms
the deep cuts
jet is loaded up with 15 different sensors,
most of them are in the air sampling category.
And so we're going to fly around at 65,000 feet
and we'll have targets of interest
where the thunderstorms are and when we get there will be
descending, stepping down what the scientists called dips.
So we'll be dipping down out of 65,000 different
layered altitude holding that altitude for ten, 15 minutes
and then going down to the next altitude.
And we do these upstream and downstream of the thunderstorms
and they sample the outflow from the thunderstorms
before takeoff.
Obviously I get a briefing from the scientists
what the goals are today where they want us to go.
Here's here's a complex of storms
or it may even be the storms were there yesterday
and the outflow from the storms is now drifted downstream
hundreds of miles with the jet stream. Right.
So it could it could be quite a bit
different than where it was yesterday.
And maybe the storms are even gone today.
It's just it's just what they pumped up
there is what we're sampling.
So sometimes I can't see the storm at all.
And so I just have to go
where the scientists tell me where to go.
Other times
I can see the storms
and it's pretty obvious what they're trying to capture.
So I have a little more freedom
to maneuver the jet as required.
On those kinds of missions.
Other missions, I just go where they tell me to go
because I can't see the outflow that's no longer visible
Now the thunderstorms typically
top out at 45, 47, 48,000 feet, somewhere in that range,
depending on where you are And our strongest storms are.
So we have
tons of performance to do what we're doing.
So we're we're going to fly at 65, 67,000 feet.
There's the storm will dip down to the top of that storm
in the 45 50,000 foot range,
you know, tons of performance to do that.
So the jet can easily get up and down it those altitudes.
I can't think of another airplane
that could carry this many sensors
and fly at those altitudes and do that kind of a mission.
This is really a unique platform for that