#EarthDayAtHome with Pilot Dean Neeley

Good morning, this is Dean Neeley. I’m the Deputy Chief Pilot at the Armstrong Flight Research Center out in Southern California with NASA. This morning, I would talk to you a little bit about Airborne Science and particularly the ER-2, the high altitude aircraft that we use. It’s still the highest aircraft in the world, so we use that and several other aircraft to take science instruments up through the Earth’s atmosphere in different environments and be able to study the composition, the effects, the movement of the air and our atmosphere, cloud formations, aerosols, pollution, things like that. All the way down to looking at the topography of the Earth’s surface and small changes in that surface based on either flooding, erosion, glacier movement, volcanoes, earthquake fault lines, things like that. So we study everything inside the Earth’s atmosphere from the very top at the edge all the way down to the Earth’s surface.

We 01:00 - use a variety of aircraft with different instruments strapped on them to do that. So today I’ll talk to you for a few minutes about some of that. Here with the Airborne Science mission that we have, which is a little bit different than Flight Test and Aircraft Development, we use everything from the ER-2, which operates at the top of the Earth’s atmosphere. We also fly Gulfstream GIIIs, a small business jet with synthetic aperture radar underneath that looks down at the Earth’s surface and can look through clouds and everything. We also use a DC-8, it’s a large aircraft, a flying laboratory that we can fly at all altitudes, mostly with instruments that are sampling air high and low altitude.

And 01:47 - then we also have a another aircraft, which is a 747 special performance, that has a big German telescope that sticks out the back. That one actually looks up and out of the Earth’s atmosphere out in other galaxies where we discover new bodies and things like that, and star formations, and see how they behave and these are many many light-years away. So, that’s an exciting aircraft, as well. Today, I’ll focus on the ER-2, our high-altitude aircraft. It’s a single- seater airplane based on the the Air Force U2 built by Lockheed. So it’s a small airplane, small cockpit, very long wings on it so that it can still produce lift way up high in the Earth’s atmosphere.

It’s got a 02:34 - very strong engine, no afterburner, but enough power on the ground where it’s almost a one-to-one thrust-to-weight ratio. I mean, there’s almost as much thrust as there is weight of the aircraft, so when we take off at sea level it goes straight up. It’s an amazing experience when you first take off. One of the challenges that we have since we fly so high, it flies above 70,000 feet, so we’re about 13 miles above the Earth’s atmosphere when we fly this aircraft, and because of that there’s not much air pressure up there. So, to keep all the liquid in our body together, almost as if you’re in outer space on the moon or something like that, we’ve got to wear a spacesuit.

03:17 - So this full pressure suit keeps everything together, but it causes a few challenges in the cockpit as well. Normally on a regular aircraft we would fly with a headset and microphones like you’d see on an airliner or a general aviation aircraft. Some aircraft we may have to wear a helmet and a mask, like this one, with oxygen supplied to us for high performance, mostly. For flying the ER-2 in the lower atmosphere we will fly with this helmet and a normal flight suit, like I’m wearing right now. That will give us protection in case we had to use the ejection seat if we were having a bad day out there.

Normally, we’re doing a 04:04 - science mission where we want to take the airplane and the set of science instruments way up high to look down through clouds and aerosol formations and the flow through the air and how those behave together, then we’re gonna wear this full spacesuit here. In that case, we have a little more robust helmet, like this one, that goes along with a spacesuit. It’s got an oxygen leads that go through the back of the helmet and plug into the aircraft. Some of the problems that we have with that is in the spacesuit you can’t hear anything, feel anything, you can’t smell, it takes all of your senses away, so there’s a real kind of a claustrophobic feeling you can get, and that gets a little bit exciting at times, and some people really wouldn’t like it. So, the few of us that fly this aircraft for NASA we have to really enjoy being in that environment and it is very exciting, and I’ve been doing it for years and really loved it.

When we put the space 05:10 - suit on, our gloves are very cumbersome. This one here is one of mine and you can see that wearing this it’s very difficult to feel anything, you don’t have a real sense of touch for details, pushing small buttons, using the flight controls, things like that, trying to write with a pencil, or something like that, is very challenging. Another issue that we’ve got that we have to get past is, how do you eat food or drink water during a long mission? We can be up there for 8 to 10 hours sitting still, strapped into an ejection seat with a parachute and not much room to move around. I’m a small person and with the space suit on my shoulders touch the sides of the canopy, and so it’s very cramped in there. So with all those hours wearing this suit you’re not going to be able to move your arms and legs very much, and that can be a problem.

To eat and drink, typically 06:09 - we’ll use a water bottle like this that sits back behind the ejection seat with a modified straw that can go through the small bladder in the space helmet. I’ll show you that real quick. That’s this little port right here that allows us to put the straw in there and then that way we’re able to get the straw into our mouth and take sips of water without compromising this suit. The other thing that we do if you want something to eat we have tube food. It comes in this small tube, it looks like a tube of toothpaste, and then we put an adapter, this hard straw, on it and do the same thing. It goes through the same bladder and through that port we’re able to squeeze liquefied food.

It’s 06:55 - almost like baby food, really, in to our mouth and that’s how we eat during a long flight. So a few challenges that come with that. The exciting part is taking all these challenges together and being able to still fly, operate the aircraft, in a challenging environment way up high where the air is very thin, makes it very rewarding as well. That’s why most of the NASA research pilots that fly this aircraft, and the others, really enjoy the challenge in the variety of what we do when we go to work each day. That’s something I wouldn’t trade for anything and I feel very fortunate that I was able to participate with this kind of an operation and the great people that we work with every day in Airborne Science. So thanks for the time today, and I hope this gave you a little bit of information and insight into what we do at the NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center in supporting Airborne Science. .