A high-flying NASA research plane arrived Wednesday at Hunter Army Airfield to begin a two-month mission of collecting data on East Coast snowstorms.
One of NASA’s two Lockheed ER-2 flying laboratories — capable of reaching altitudes of over 68,000 feet — was flown from its base in Palmdale, California to Savannah, touching down at sunset. The advanced aircraft, similar to the Lockheed U-2 spy plane, will be stationed at Hunter through the rest of winter to carry out research for the space agency’s three-year Investigation of Microphysics and Precipitation for Atlantic Coast-Threatening Snowstorms (IMPACTS).
Two pilots will take turns flying the ER-2 out of Savannah on data-collecting operations for NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center two or three times weekly, soaring high above wintertime weather systems along the Eastern Seaboard, according to Gerald Heymsfield, the deputy principal investigator with IMPACTS. The project’s primary goals include determining why snow forms in certain bands within weather systems, and how it is distributed.
“Instruments from this plane will profile a cloud,” Heymsfield said, noting that the ER-2 has a very different function from the lower-flying weather-research planes that soar directly into storm systems. “We call it remote sensing because it’s not flying into the clouds.”
The sleek ER-2, with a single jet engine and a 105-foot wingspan, carries only its pilot and numerous high-tech sensors that can collect terabytes of data on a single flight. NASA chose Hunter Army Airfield as a base for this winter’s IMPACTS operations because the installation could provide a hangar where the sensitive technology will be protected, and because Savannah’s temperate climate is far removed from major winter storms that the plane will monitor.
“It’s a challenging plane to land,” said Tim Williams, one of the Armstrong Flight Research Center pilots who will be flying the ER-2 out of Savannah, adding that it would be dangerous to operate this aircraft within a snowstorm. “I get to fly over them and go, ‘Oh, I’m glad I’m up here.’”
According to Williams, the experience of flying at a height of 20 kilometers is exhilarating.
“It’s amazing. You can see the curves of the Earth, all the things that astronauts see,” Williams said.
Williams’s fellow Armstrong Flight Research Center pilot Cory Bartholomew, who flew the ER-2 to Savannah from Palmdale on Wednesday, agreed that flying above most of the Earth’s atmosphere is an extraordinary opportunity.
“You just sort of enter a zen mode where time kinda goes by,” Bartholomew said, noting that some data-collecting flights can last 12 hours. “I dig being part of the science. I don’t understand any of it.”
