On Wednesday evening at sunset, HALO landed at its home base in Oberpfaffenhofen. The operators on board were tired but happy to be at home (or only a few hours’ train ride away) after three more flights on the way back from Río Grande. Favorable wind conditions even allowed for a little detour further to the north over the North Sea to sample more of the northern hemispheric stratosphere.

This termiates the first phase of the SouthTRAC campaign, with a total of twenty flights since 19th August, seventeen of them with scientific use. Ten flights were carried out as local flights based at the airport of Río Grande, Tierra del Fuego. Our co-project manager Georg compiled a small statistics of these local flights: the total flight duration was 86.6 hours and the total flight length was 37,291 NM or 69,063 km. That’s more than one and a half times around the globe or the length of more than 650,000 football pitches, as we love to say in Germany.

All instrument groups can attest successful measurements during the first phase. As always on such long deployments, some errors and malfunctions occured sometime or other. With hard work, dedication and team play, the participants did a great work in keeping all instruments in operational status until now. The break will be used for extensive testing and repair to ensure further operation during the second phase.