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1998 Intrumentation Tests| Overview | Flights | Reports | OverviewThe armored T-28 deployed to Ft. Collins-Loveland Airport (FNL), for two weeks in June, 1998, for flight tests of new and refurbished research equipment. New equipment included a Science Engineering Associates (SEA) data acquisition system, a Droplet Measurement Technologies (DMT) liquid water probe, a video recording system, a prototype Stratton Park Engineering Corporation High Volume Particle Spectrometer Probe (HVPS), and two systems of electric field meters mounted in underwing pods from the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology (NMIMT). A newly refurbished Particle Measuring Systems, Inc. (PMS) Forward Scattering Spectrometer Probe (FSSP), was also flown for the first time.In-flight guidance was available to the pilots from the ground, via radio link with the CSU-CHILL S-band meteorological research radar. Six research flights in small to large convective storms, in the vicinity of the CHILL radar, were carried out within the two-week program. Most of the equipment worked well, in some cases after some tinkering.
The NMIMT field meter pods proved to have a negative effect on aircraft
performance and handling and caused the facility to re-direct its efforts
to improve the T-28 electric field meter system. Plans to build pod
meters for the T-28 were changed and instead a 6th meter was added to the
system of 5 meters mounted at various locations on the airframe. Also,
the unrefurbished PMS OAP-2D-C two-dimensional particle imaging probe showed
erratic behavior, leading to a subsequent significant refurbishment.
Research Flights
Data from Flight 717 on 6/22/98 was part of the basis for a presentation at a radar meteorology conference in 1999: Kennedy, P. C., A. Detwiler and P. L. Smith, 1999: Radar and aircraft
observations of microphysical evolution in updraft regions of a High Plains
multicellular thunderstorm.
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