#EarthDayAtHome with Pilot Dave Fedors

Hello, my name is Dave Fedors. I’m a NASA research test pilot at NASA’s facility at in Palmdale and Edwards Air Force Base, California. One of the airplanes I fly is the DC-8. It’s used for Earth science and I wanted to talk about the airplane and some of its missions with you. It’s the first generation jet transport. There’s very few of them still flying. NASA’s airplane was built in 1967 and NASA got it in 1986. First thing they did was re-engine it with modern 737 engines and then we’ve been operating it ever since. It’s been a great, great platform. The airplane has a number of advantages. One it’s got an extremely long range. You can fly across the Pacific Ocean without too much trouble.

It has a lot of payload 00:44 - space so it’s going to fit a lot of instruments and scientists onboard. It has really large windows which we use to put instruments in. So we take the window glass out and and put a plate with a probe so that scientists can gather atmospheric samples while the aircraft’s in-flight. For an airplane its size it can fly both fast and slow which is somewhat unique. There’s probably not another airplane I can think of it as quite as versatile as NASA’s DC-8.

Also 01:12 - NASA has done a lot of modifications. They’ve put kind of standardized holes in the top and bottoms that we can fit instruments in that make it really easy to integrate instrument packages. The airplane supports NASA’s Earth science mission. Earth Science is basically the study of the Earth that encompasses several disciplines. Obviously it’s an airplane that flies in the atmosphere, so meteorology, which is study of weather, is one area that we’ve done studies on.

The 01:40 - scientists will come up with a scientific problem or objective or an area they want to gather data for, and they’ll design a campaign around around that and then based on what the objectives of the campaign are, they’ll select instruments and then we NASA Armstrong will integrate those instruments onboard the aircraft. Then we fly the airplane locally make sure the instruments check out and that they’re compatible with the airframe. I’d like to talk about three of the campaigns that I participated on in NASA’s DC-8. The first is the KORUS-AQ KORUS stands for the Korean US, it’s actually a trade agreement and AQ stands for air quality. They have a lot of factories and additionally they have a fairly bad air pollution problem they’ve got a lot of smog, and so the Koreans invited NASA and the DC-8 to come over see if they could figure out where a lot of the air pollution was coming from and how it changed over time.

We flew up and down 02:36 - the South Korean Peninsula. It was extremely challenging from a piloting perspective to fly low level over Korea in a large airplane with the language different differences in the kind of congested air space but I think we got a really good set of data that the Koreans will use to try and reduce their air pollution problem. The next campaign I’d like to talk about was one that was actually done in four parts called it the Atmospheric Tomography. Tomography means cross section, so they’re trying to get a cross-section of the atmosphere, and they wanted to do it different seasons so we actually flew this whole mission four times. So we take off at Palmdale, fly up to Alaska, went as far north as the Arctic Ocean.

So we’re getting a 03:18 - cross-section the atmosphere. We would climb the airplane up to its cruise altitude which is about 35,000 feet, stay up there for a couple of minutes and descend down to 500 feet over the ocean, stay down there for a couple minutes and come back up. So we’re doing these dips we called them up and down the whole way. There’s probably not another airplane I can think of that could have done those on especially on some of the longer legs. From Alaska we went down to Hawaii, and then each stop we’re spending a couple days basically to work on the instruments, doing any work on the aircraft and rest ourselves. From Hawaii we went to Fiji.

On that leg 03:56 - we crossed the equator and there’s a lot of interesting meteorological things that occur as you cross the equator that’s where the kind of southern and northern hemisphere weather patterns converge. From Fiji we went to Christchurch, New Zealand. And then one of my the most interesting legs was from Christchurch, New Zealand all the way to Punta Arenas. That’s an extremely remote part of the world there’s no places you can land if you have an emergency. So it took, took a lot of planning and again we’re doing dips the whole way so we’re climbing descending.

And what was 04:24 - interesting to me is the scientists found lots of indications of atmospheric pollution even in that remote part of the world. From Punta Arenas we worked our way up the Atlantic Ocean, the first stop was Ascension Island. From Ascension we went to the Azores from the Azores we went to Thule, Greenland and then from Thule, Greenland we flew back to Alaska and then the final leg was Alaska home. Again a very rewarding and challenging campaign. Last campaign I’d like to talk about is IceBridge.

There was a period 04:57 - of years where they didn’t have satellite coverage of polar ice caps and so to bridge the gap they used aircraft. DC-8 was used in Antarctica NASA’s P-3 was used up in Greenland and the Arctic. So for about about a 10 year period we deployed the DC-8 to Punta Arenas, Chile and then flew over Western Antarctica getting about as far south as the South Pole looking at sea ice, looking at glacier ice, and looking at the ice pack. We flew the same legs every two years apart so good the scientists could see the changes in the ice thickness year over year. These these were very fun flights to fly, I get to fly low level over Antarctica.

Typically we get up, take 05:43 - off in the morning, fly about, it takes about three hours to get the DC-8 down to Antarctica. And then when we’re down there we’re flying low-level, a thousand, five hundred feet to two thousand feet for seven or eight hours and then afterwards to climb back up another two or three hours back to Punta Arenas and land. So they were long days but really rewarding you get to see a lot of Antarctica. It’s a starkly beautiful area it’s enormous. The whole time we were down there we saw nothing but rocks and ice.

It is really 06:15 - almost hard, hard to believe unless unless you see it. So there are three campaigns that I was lucky enough to participate in using the NASA DC-8 so thank you very much. .