Every morning - Full Power


We are not the only people working everyday at the airport. There is Manuela the friendly airport manager, a couple of police man who change from day to day and fill our visitor ID cards, all the nice security staff who during day check our backpacks and in the evening sometimes show up in the hotel. And there are the firefighters "Bombeiros".

Those guys have everyday half an hour of fun driving around their heavy trucks and afterwards they simply wait for the late SATA flight.   

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Final flight or one more?

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Below the helicopter Eye-to-eye with a cloud The helicopter returned from Pico with everyone smiling. As ACTOS and SMART-HELIOS were ready for take-off, the smile of the pilots got a bit smaller due to their reduced lunch break. But nevertheless, we started at 12:55. As the Stratocumulus was too far to the north, we decided to make some Aerosol-legs. In total we did four of them on 7000 ft, 4000 ft, 2000 ft and 1000 ft, so one above the inversion and 3 below. We saw some slashes of wales. But every time we got closer, they disappeared again. During our flights we overflew and circumnavigated some single cumulus clouds. In the end, the only stratocumulus like cloud was in the lee of the island. On our way back, we sampled this cloud flying upstream to the island. Then we safely returned to the airport after almost two hours. SMART-HELIOS worked again the whole time with a reduced sensor package, while the inertial moment unit of ACTOS failed. Thus, it will be hard to corre
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Short bye to Pico - My visit at Graciosa and the Helicopter-flight on Monday, 17th of July

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Clouds over Graciosa - the only clouds that were close enough that day Last week Silvia asked me if I am interested in visiting the scientist-group at Graciosa and if I want to see how research and daily work is going on at Graciosa-airport. After shortly thinking about it (and some slight worries, that in the meantime when I am at Graciosa there could be another shut-down at the ICO-Station on Pico mountain) Birgit organized the flights. The trip to Graciosa took a whole day, because there were no direct flights from Pico to Graciosa and so I started around 9 am. First I had to take the ferry from Madalena to Horta and had my first flight from Faial to Terceira. After waiting a few hours at Terceira-airport I took of at 16:10pm and 30 minutes later I arrived at Graciosa. View from the helicopter It was nice to see how the group worked together and after a nice welcome, they introduced me a little in how everything works at the airport. The next day
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It’s hard work to get good data

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At some days, it is particularly hard work to get good data. Today was such a day. As the weather was still promising after the morning flight, we decided to have a second flight in the afternoon. Some stratocumulus cloud fields were present, so we cloud people wanted to go for catching some of them. The plan was to start directly after lunch break, but while sweating in the helicopter, we had to wait for the controller to finish lunchtime as well. Then, after starting the engines, a beep and a red light indicated a problem with one of the two power generators. The heli can fly with only one generator and a battery as backup, but the ACTOS data monitoring had switched to battery mode. Finally, after the usual start procedure “HELIOS airborne – continue climbing – ACTOS airborne” the ground crew noticed, that ACTOS wasn’t pointing into the direction of flight, so we decided to return to the airfield. The ground crew couldn’t find any suspicious failures and ACTOS was flying in
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