Campaign diary on 11 September 2008

The worst day of the campaign (yesterday) is followed by the best day: In the morning we wake up after not too many hours of sleep, but with the good news that fuelling for the Falcon is already turned on again. Many thanks to Dan Eleutario and ONR who somehow managed to get this working within a day! We are not sure how this actually all worked, but very happy with it. Also thanks to all the other people involved ranging from the local support by Freddie Koonce and George Wehrung (I apologize, but I will never remember the correct titles...), Pat Harr, Jim Moore, people at DLR to several people that were involved that we did not meet. The DIAL integration was finished just in time and for the first time all instruments were working without any issues. The first flight was quite cloudy, but who could complaing after a 4 aircraft mission in a category 4 typhoon?

Sarah and Chris suggested a slight modification of the last part of the flight to get into the remnants of TCS037, which seemed to have an open center on the satellite image. I left it to Doris to communicate that to the pilots, which worked after she found out that calling does not only require the cell phone to be located in the ops-center, but instead needs the landline in the ops-center. In the evening the Falcon did not arrive for quite a while and i admit that we took advantage of Doris getting somewhat nervous. Where had she sent them in the end of the flight with lots of thunderstorms in the Tokyo area? Well, the Falcon arrived safely with a 20 min delay, ATC did not allow to go back to the original track after the modification and they had to do a loop around the Tokyo area, which was really busy due to bad weather conditions.

A visit of NHK was successfully avoided - thanks to Sandra Arnold...

Author: Martin W.