Ike the hurricane is gone. The aftermath, however, will be with us for some time to come. I had the opportunity to make three flights into Ike as it crossed the Gulf toward Texas, and I want to give you a sense of what they were like, almost to the time when Ike make landfall at Galveston, TX.
As you know our aircraft for the most part serve as platforms for research scientists to acquire data that can be used to improve
hurricane understanding and predictions. As such, we always carry a Principal Investigator (PI) who presents the plan for each mission. The PI works through one of our meteorologists who serves as the Flight Director (FD) for the mission. They always put their heads together to work out details of the mission before the pre-flight briefing, which is held two hours prior to flight time. These two activities are shown to the right.
While this briefing is taking place, crew members on the aircraft are preparing the plane for the mission, which includes preparing the scientific systems for the mission, fueling the aircraft with almost 9,000 gal. of aviation gas, and loading expendables such as the Airborne Expendable Bathythermograph (AXBT), a buoy that is dropped into the water to obtain profiles of temperature for the calculation of ocean heat budgets. A couple of images showing these activities are shown to the left.
The final activity that takes place before takeoff is what we call
the plane-side brief. This, in effect, is a safety briefing during which all aspects of the mission are discussed and assignments made for duties that must be performed in case of an emergency.
And now it's time to start engines, taxi to the runway at MacDill AFB and take off. This and a description of the flight will be presented in Pt. II of this posting. Don't forget that you can click on any of the pictures to enlarge them. Just hit your browser back button to return to the blog.
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