Unmanned hurricane plane based on Delmarva
Molly Murray, The News Journal
A mass of clouds – a weather system likely to become a tropical storm or hurricane – swirled just off the Cape Verde Islands near Africa.
Thursday afternoon, it was called Invest 91 L but eventually, if it strengthens, it will be named Edouard.
So Thursday night, a team of scientists went in for a closer look. Lt. Commander Jon Neuhaus handled the aircraft controls as scientists prepared to deploy instruments and monitor the data coming in.
The plane, a sleek, white aircraft originally developed for military use, has wings that are so long, it looks like a glider. Those wings carry a large portion of the fuel needed to get the plane to the coast of Africa, deploy instruments and collect data, and then return to the Delmarva Peninsula, 35 miles south of Delaware.
It can stay in the air for more than 28 hours, has impressive climbing stats – it reaches close to its cruising altitude of 60,000 feet above Earth in 30 minutes, and can do things that other planes can’t because of its “very impressive capabilities,” said Chris Naftel, the NASA project manager.
The reason: The plane is autonomous, meaning that Neuhaus and the scientific team are at Wallops Island in an operations center filled with computers the entire time the plane is flown and data is collected.
“I’m sitting in the forward operations room,” Neuhaus said. In front “it’s the real cockpit of the airplane … it’s just like flying.”
He monitors the engine, flight speed and other critical features that pilots pay attention to in flight. The only drawback, he said, is he can’t smell or hear things that might tip off a pilot to a problem or a need to adapt. The plane, called a Global Hawk, carries more than half its weight in fuel, he said.
From the NASA Flight Facility at Wallops Island in Virginia, the plane takes off and heads directly over the ocean, flies east to the target and then follows a series of precomputed passes above the forming hurricane.
Specialized weather sensors – about the size of a paper towel roll holder – collect temperature, humidity, and wind speed and direction data. Another instrument looks at the cloud layers and a third picks off temperature and water vapor data.
Pilots are typically limited to the time they can stay in the air. But the autonomous Global Hawk can stay aloft 25 to 26 hours and spend better than half that time collecting scientific data, said principal investigator Scott Braun.
