 Hi everybody, now you can hear me better. Welcome back, we have been having a huge fun day full of science shenanigans today for Super Science Saturday and it is not over yet. So if you were with us for the last one, I mentioned at the end of our last session that this is a pretty special piece of what happens at NCAR, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, that most people might not even know exists. We have our own research aviation facility and we manage aircraft that are specially designed for the kinds of atmospheric research that we do. So today I'm gonna introduce you to our friends Jeanine and Andrew and they're gonna take you on a little behind the scenes tour into the research aircraft facility. And I wanna just make a little note real quick for anybody who's watching us on YouTube. We did have some audio glitches earlier in time and we hope that we have fixed those if you notice that there is still no audio, check the chat and there'll be some information and a link that you can go elsewhere so that you can hear what Jeanine and Andrew have to say to you. So with that, I'm gonna turn it over to Jeanine and Andrew. Well, hi everybody. So yeah, I'm Jeanine and this is Andrew and we work at the research aviation facility at NCAR. So research for doing atmospheric research and aviation for airplanes. So we do atmospheric research on airplanes and I am a software engineer. Andrew is an aircraft mechanic. We see I'm gonna give you a little bit of a bigger picture of the plane. I'm gonna switch my camera around in a second but we're gonna start with Andrew. He can tell you all the details about how the plane flies. I actually don't know much about that. So let me try to switch my camera. Okay. All right, there we go. So I'm an aircraft mechanic here. I am responsible for helping maintain this aircraft to keep it in a safe, airworthy manner and fixing any discrepancies that happen on it. So a couple of things about our plane here is that it is a Gulfstream G5. It was built at Gulfstream and then after it was built at Gulfstream we got sent to Lockheed Martin where they did a lot of modifications to it. They reinforced parts of the wings so we can put pylons and other experiments on it. They cut a whole bunch of holes in it so we can put on like different view ports and other probes stick out of the plane. She's got a range of about 7,000 miles. So to give you an idea that would be from flying from Florida to Seattle or another good one would be from Anchorage all the way down to Hawaii. And you can say airborne for about 10 hours doing that. So it gives us a lot of good time to study the atmosphere, study the chemistry in the clouds and that sort of thing. And she also has an altitude of about 50,000 feet. So she can get really high up there, actually be above the weather and even do some experiments that might have to deal with like outer space and that sort of thing. So yeah, just we can do a quick walk around up here. Go up into the plane. While we're out here, I'm going to point out this is one of the new ports which I'm going to talk about from the inside in a moment. Hopefully it's not too loud, but here is the cockpit. This is all the stuff obviously that the pilots need to fly. What I did to make sure to pull up was our synthetic vision here. So this is a pretty cool feature. I mean, you're not seeing much right now because we're kind of facing these things. So you've seen the planes, but what the synthetic vision does is it's almost like a video game. You can actually, while you're flying up through the clouds when you can't see the ground or anything, this will actually show you different landmarks and things to watch out for underneath the plane. So it's a manual tool for the pilots to use. And then here's all the stuff that I usually end up doing with. These are all of our engine controls and gauges as tells you the fuel. And if you want more detailed analysis of it, you can click on the fuel. Those are our fuel tanks right now. These are the valves that are open. Obviously we're not running anything. So nothing's really flowing. We can check the power. We can see how much AC and DC voltage we have. Where it's coming from. Our engine's running. Let's see here. Hydraulics, like all sorts of stuff you can check with this here. Yeah, so these are hydraulics. You can see these are all valves along with some pumps to tell you the fluid where to go with us going out to the flaps or ailerons or control surfaces. Good one here too is flight controls. So this will actually tell you what your flight services are doing. So if you see if I pull back, they'll tell me my elevators are moving up, which would actually then bring the nose up and back down. That is so cool. Yep, it's a lot of what I do. And I spend time up here making sure that everything is calibrated except for the pilots before they take off and spend a lot of wrenches in the back. Yeah, so I have a car, obviously, not an airplane. And I take my car to a mechanic. You're a plane mechanic. How is being a plane mechanic the same or different than being a car mechanic? There are some similarities. But the thing is, I actually tell people that aircraft can be in a lot of ways are almost more simpler than vehicles just because there's a lot of redundancies and you don't have to attack on extra stuff like a transmission and all that. You're using the mass of the air going through the engines propelled the plane forward. So there's actually like less stuff there. There's a lot of redundancies. E-gonics, this all stuff can get a little complicated when you start getting into the programming of it and making sure it's updated with the proper navigation setups. So that can get a little complicated, but it's not that bad. It's awesome. It's a really good job. OK, so here's a random question for you. Does an airplane have a horn like a car? It actually does. Wow, there actually is a horn. I think I can hear that. Yeah, maybe, I don't know. That is an alarm for the outside. So something is to go wrong like in here and one of those mechanics is outside. The pilots can hit that button, alert us if something's wrong, we can come up and see what's going on. And then they'll also pull up a checklist and tell the pilots what they need to do to fix whatever was going on or figure out what it was going on. But the rules. There are all sorts of warning things in here, too. So here, these are all system test fuels. Yeah, we can actually light up the entire cockpit here. So we use this to check all of the lights, make sure none of them are burnt out. There are so many knobs and buttons. How long did it take you to learn, like, memorize all without the thing done? Oh, I'm still learning. I am still learning. I'm a lot to know on this airplane, but luckily, once you actually have figured out, it's really not that bad. Very cool. So shall I tell them a little about the back of the plane? Yeah, absolutely. All right, I'm going to hand this over, so. Okay. I don't have to play hockey today. I thought initially when we were going to do this, that the plane was going to be empty. And this is an airplane, you know, a jet. CEOs might have one for their company and it'd be all full of seats, but we took all that stuff out and we put in these metal racks. We'll put it through each one of them, but today we have this huge instrument here. It's an airborne stabilized platform. So what that means is while the plane is in the air, bouncing around and jostling, this should cancel out that motion and give the instrument a stable view of the outside. And this instrument is for measuring an eclipse. They're taking it down to Chile and then to over Antarctica, because on December 4th over in Antarctica, there is going to be a solar eclipse. And this will measure the solar eclipse in infrared wavelengths, which is heat rather than light, like our eyes can see. So they're all electromagnetic waves, but will be in a different wavelength. But it has all these mirrors. It's going to be looking out through that part that I showed you from the outside. There's some tubing here. It has to be kept cool with liquid nitrogen because it's measuring heat and the excess heat can mess up the measurements. I don't know much more about it. And one has a telescope. So I think it's pretty neat. I didn't know if it'd be installed in time for our tour, but it's here. Something we don't always get to see. Mostly what I do when I work. Just get a quick little view of it. Yeah. So all these racks of instruments, the rack that I need to charge it, I'll put it back here. This is the center of our computer network. So you can imagine nowadays, every instrument collects almost every instrument, not all of them, but most of them collect data and they want it's digital, right? It's going to tell me over the network. It's going to be displayed on computers. So you've got instruments on the wing. You've got instruments out there. Wherever you have instruments, they all have a little computer and all those computers are networked together and connected to our server here. We can combine all that data. We can get some pieces of it to send to the ground during a flight so that scientists can monitor on the ground. As you probably noticed, walking through there aren't that many seats, not that many people can actually fly. So we have a bunch of other people on the ground. So we send data, it goes from here up to a satellite, back down to a server in Boulder and then out to wherever we are in the world. So even the people who are, say they're in Chile or Hawaii or wherever we've got a project on the ground, they could be monitoring their data and make sure, and then we have a chat function just like you might be familiar with, a text messaging that's up the back and forth to the plane and they can tell somebody on the plane, hey, my instrument needs a reboot or I think it's getting too hot. Could you turn it off for a while or whatever? So yeah, so this is the part that I do. And we have security on it. We have to make sure that nobody can hack in in the modern world and mess up our flights. So that's the part that I know more about but I think the instrument's cool, honestly. You can see the instrument again? Yeah, absolutely. And then, Tiffany, maybe we can see if there's some questions and maybe we'll step outside so we can hear and make answers. Yep, that's so cool. Okay, here we go. Awesome. Put the plane there for now. So can you hear us, Tiffany? Yeah, can you hear me okay? Yes. Super, we do have an interesting question from Violet. They're wondering, is it hard to build a plane? Is it hard to build a plane? That sounds like an Andrew question to me. Yes, it is actually. In fact, we can even show you how hard it can be. If we walk over here, I'll show the maintenance bay. Everything is very specialized on the airplane. All the rivets, all the metal has to be tested for vibrations and strength. Even the paint is really special. The paint, it can be, say we're flying in Colorado and it's the middle of summer, the paint has to be able to handle 100 degrees down here and then probably negative 50 or 60 up at altitude or more. So everything about it has to be like vibration tested and calibrated and all that. So up here to give you an idea of how complicated it can be, this is the maintenance bay. This is where I spend a lot of my time. Hopefully we don't lose the signal, but yep, there's batteries below me right there. There's another smaller jet engine in here. Up here there's like valves, a lot of pneumatic lines. If you can see that little volleyball thing back there, that's actually the fire extinguisher for the engines. So yeah, this is where I spend a lot of my time. So they can be very hard to manufacture. That's pretty cool. I've never actually seen inside of it before. You're gonna lose a feeder. No, I don't know. There's another question, an interesting question about how fast and how high this plane can fly. I think about 600 knots and 50,000 feet. And knots are pretty similar to miles per hour, right? Yes, one nautical mile is about 1.3 miles. Yeah, okay, wow. That is faster and higher than I thought. Is that another question about how big the plane is? A hundred feet long, we can... Yeah, we'll walk over in there. I haven't had to memorize the dimensions in it for quite some time. Yeah, I've got to switch my camera around or you'll look at me, that's not as fun. So yeah, it's a pretty big hanger. That's a big plane. I would say maybe if anyone has ever flown on a commercial airplane to go on a trip or something, it's not as big as most of those airplanes, right? No, it's not. The lengthwise not so much. Wing span-wise might actually be pretty close. Since a plane can fly 7,000 miles, the wings are the fuel tank. So the wings, you can see how big these wings are. That's all the fuel that it carries to get that range. So yeah, it's pretty big for a corporate jet, it is very large. Yeah, yeah. And another question, we've got some good questions coming in. There's another question about how often this plane is actually out flying on projects or such. So for this year, yeah, it's been a little weird, right? Because of the pandemic, we were not able to fly very much. We actually did manage this summer to do a couple of small projects from here in Boulder so that we could make sure everything's working, get some science done, kind of dust off the cobwebs from 2020. But next year and the year after, we are gonna be catching up. So when we deploy, we usually go for two months to the field somewhere. And normally we'd go a couple of times a year, but we'll be going maybe three times a year or four over the next couple of years because we're catching up from all the science that had to be delayed while everybody was staying safe at home and we were getting vaccinated and all that stuff. Yeah, we're gonna have to wait to get things back in action, huh? Yeah, it's gonna be exciting. One of our big trips next summer, assuming it all works out, they're still working out the details, we'll be in Southern Korea. Oh, cool. I think that's gonna be culturally very interesting to go see. Yeah, just all the travel that gets to come along with working on these planes, huh? Yeah. Perk. There's one more question coming in about how long does it take to build an airplane? How long? Good question. I think about a couple of months on a normal factory floor. I have one more fun thing to show you guys that I like. So this is a big hanger and we need to circulate the air and keep it cool or at least, you know, keep it from getting too hot when we're working in here. And so we have these fans. It's not on right now, but it spins. And if I can zoom in, I don't know if it'll let me on here or if any of you have really good eyes, you might be able to read what it says right there in the middle. Can you read that, Tiffany? No, but maybe my glasses need to be clean. Yeah, it's small. It has got a picture of a donkey and it says big ass fans. I think that's pretty funny. That fan is even bigger than a large donkey. On that note, do we have any more questions coming in? We've had some really great questions for this. Everyone's always curious about airplanes, right? It doesn't look like we have any more questions coming in. Well, I know, I mean, I've worked here for a few years and I've hardly gotten the chance to go and walk around in that airplane. So this has been a super cool behind the scenes look even for some of us who are on staff. Me too. I haven't actually ever gone to walk around with Andrew and get a cooler. So I saw things I've never seen before. So cool. Well, thank you so much, Janine and Andrew, for making a trip out there to the hangar for Super Science Saturday. That was really fun for everyone. And I think we don't see any more questions coming in. So I think we can say goodbye and happy flying to you when you get a chance to. Thanks for this cool special tour with us. Thank you. We'll be back everybody at 2.30 with our next session. See you soon.