Campaign diary on 16 September 2008

Finally the dream case mission for typhoon targeting, the lidars are working well and also refuelling works smoothly. Nevertheless, the good mood disappears suddenly as we get a phone call from Bessho-san during refuelling in Kadean telling us that there is only one working dropsonde left!!! We decide to modify the rturn flight to get at least less cloudy conditions for the lidars. Frank surprises everyone by making a new flight plan, an unknown skill that we will need a lot in the upcoming days. Submitting the new flight plan is succesful and also gives decent lidar observations, but after the extended stay in Kadena due to the modifications and also a short thunderstorm, it turns out to be a very long day for the crew. Working time limits require some discussions in the evening, the mission tomorrow needs to be postponed to the afternoon and it is agreed that only a single mission can be performed on 18 September.

It turns out that a box with unsuitable dropsondes with nearly the same packing as the regular dropsondes was delivered to us and the investigation why these dropsondes were delivered to us and if there are more of them adds to even more stress to the day. Unfortunately, all these dropsondes are on our dream mission now. Bessho-san finds two other working dropsondes somewhere in the aircraft and at least positions the three last sondes perfectly.

Alltogether we had a successful mission today, but the team is wasted.

Author: Martin W.