Photos courtesy of University of Wyoming
Editor’s note: King Air magazine featured the University of Wyoming’s King Air fleet in a January 2018 article titled “For Science’s Sake.”
The University of Wyoming announced recently that it received a $14.8 million U.S. National Science Foundation grant that will provide operation and maintenance funding for the new NSF/King Air atmospheric research aircraft that flew its first study mission this past summer.
The five-year grant began Sept. 1 and runs through Aug. 31, 2031, for UW, which is the only academic institution in the United States that provides a research aircraft facility to the atmospheric science community.
Airborne research started at the university in the 1960s and has used three different Beechcraft platforms. First, a twin-engine Beechcraft C-45 supported research funded by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation on the effects of cloud seeding. A doctorate-granting Department of Atmospheric Science was established in 1971, the same year a Beech Queen Air replaced the C-45. The scope of department research broadened in the 1970s, with the aircraft, faculty and staff supporting the NSF’s National Hail Research Experiment and the World Meteorological Organization’s weather modification verification projects in Spain.
UW’s Department of Atmospheric Science has been operating a King Air atmospheric research aircraft since 1977, when it was purchased for $1 million. Over the ensuing years, additional millions have been awarded by NSF and other federal agencies for instrumentation and airframe modification, such as for radar and lidar.
When UW’s 1977 King Air 200T retired in August 2022, it had flown roughly 9,000 research hours and logged thousands of flights over 45 years. It was replaced by a 2013 King Air B300, serial number FL-862.
60-plus modifications
UW purchased FL-862 in 2020 and it spent four years at Avcon Industries Inc. in Newton, Kansas, for design, installation and certification on 60-plus modifications. Jeff French, a professor and head of UW’s Department of Atmospheric Science, told King Air magazine the combination purchase and modification was an approximately $20 million project funded jointly by the NSF and UW.
Avcon outfitted the B300 with a complex integration of structural and electrical modifications that allow flexibility in mounting instruments relevant to specific research campaigns.
Senior Scientist Matt Burkhart, Aeronautical Engineer Nick Mahon and French were responsible for working with Avcon to bring the aircraft online. The B300, which carries the same tail number – N2UW – as its predecessor, was delivered to the campus in Laramie in September 2024 with an open house and ribbon-cutting event.
In a spring 2025 news release, UW announced that Avcon had received Federal Aviation Administration supplemental type certification approval for the installation of the Avcon King Air Nose Extension with sensor mounting provisions; wing tip or outboard hard points – also referred to as provisions for external stores, with significant sensor shapes; dual downward and dual upward camera ports; lower fuselage hardpoints with pylons for large external sensors; side-fuselage hardpoints for sensors; and upper fuselage hardpoints for sensors on the King Air.
In fall 2025, UW started installing and test flying instruments that are part of the King Air Research Facility. French said those flights based out of the Laramie Regional Airport (KLAR) gave the team an opportunity to test fly new instruments that were acquired and/or developed as part of the same grant that funded the new aircraft development.
The university launched its first project with the new platform during summer 2026.
Grant funds unique partnership
“This grant is absolutely critical for using the King Air to conduct research over the next five years. The grant funds the basic infrastructure that is needed for operation and maintenance of the aircraft, including all the scientific instruments that are part of the NSF/UW King Air Facility,” French said in a news release. “A lot of this comes down to people whose skill sets are highly specialized. This includes scientists, engineers, technicians, aircraft mechanics and pilots. We have 18 persons who are funded either full-time or half-time through this grant, and their skills and knowledge are what allow us to maintain a state-of-the-art research facility and support the atmospheric science research community.”
NSF Program Director Nicholas Anderson added: “NSF is excited to continue this unique partnership between the federal government and the state of Wyoming. The new NSF/King Air aircraft was purchased by the state; converted to a highly capable research platform through NSF funding from the Mid-scale Research Infrastructure-1 program; and will continue to be operated by the University of Wyoming through this new grant.”
Since 1988, the King Air platform has been part of the NSF Lower Atmospheric Observing Facilities Program, which provides base funding to UW to deploy the aircraft and its instruments in support of NSF-funded research. Under the cooperative agreement, the NSF provides nearly $3 million in base funding annually to UW to maintain the aircraft. The funding also helps pay for the staff of 18 individuals French mentioned, comprising three professional pilots, two aircraft mechanics and 13 research scientists, engineers and technicians. In exchange, UW provides the plane and instrumentation to NSF-funded investigators.
Prominence in the field
French said the latest grant illustrates the University of Wyoming’s prominence in the field.
“We are the only university in the country that houses a research aircraft that is funded as a national facility through NSF,” he said. “NSF’s two other aircraft are operated by NCAR (National Center for Atmospheric Research). Other research aircraft that are in the U.S. are operated by large agencies, such as NASA and the Department of Energy. The University of Wyoming is internationally recognized as an expert institution for airborne atmospheric measurements. We collaborate closely with many of the other aircraft operators, both in the U.S. and outside of the U.S.”
French also emphasized that operating the aircraft at a university allows for students to be involved. All the research projects where the aircraft is used have some type of student involvement, usually graduate students he said, and provides students the opportunity to work side-by-side with UW scientists and engineers.
“This often includes flying on research flights, operat-ing instruments in real time and working with the data following the flights,” French said. “UW is really the only university in the country that can provide this type of experience for students, which is why we have a such a strong reputation nationally and internationally for educating scientists within the specialty field.”
FL-862’s maiden research flights
FL-862’s maiden research mission – a collaboration involving Colorado State University, the University of Utah and the University of Montana alongside NASA and the Utah Division of Air Quality – measured summer ozone levels in the Salt Lake Valley. At lower elevations, ozone is harmful pollution that can trigger asthma, reduce lung breathing capacity and is harmful to plants.
Outfitted with equipment to measure components of ozone, including volatile organic compounds and nitrogen oxides, the B300 conducted flights twice a day from mid-July through August.
“The focus of the study is to understand the formation of ozone in the Salt Lake Valley during the summer, which is a huge air quality issue. The project was approved by NSF even before the completion of the aircraft, and we’ve known for a couple of years this would be our first project,” French explained. “We’ve worked with many of the same scientists on previous projects with our old aircraft … Instrumenting and operating an aircraft for its first project has brought a number of challenges, but it has been helpful to work with a group of scientists we are familiar with and have worked with in the past.”
Next projects scheduled for 2027
Historically, about 50 percent of the research conducted with UW’s King Air is related to cloud physics. Another 30 percent focuses on aerosols and air quality, French said. The remaining 20 percent of the aircraft’s research hours are spent on the exchange of energy between the surface of the Earth and its lower atmosphere.
The next project, slated for early 2027, will be based in Laramie and will focus on the measurements of clouds over and downwind of the mountains.
“This is a really good area to study clouds during the late winter/early spring because they tend to be very predictable on when and where they form,” he said.
The project has two principal objectives. The first is to test and verify the standard cloud physics instrumentation package on the new aircraft. Most of these instruments fly on the outside of the fuselage, mounted under the wings or on the fuselage itself.
“So, proper operation of the instruments can be tricky,” French said. “Imagine flying through an icing cloud at 200 mph and trying to measure cloud droplets and snowflakes.”
The second objective is to develop and test new algorithms for retrieving cloud characteristics from the aircraft’s radar and lidar instruments that will be mounted on the aircraft.
“These techniques that are being developed can help ‘extend’ the measurements we make to regions away – above and below the aircraft – to study the entire depth of a cloud, while still being grounded in ‘truth’ based on the detailed measurements we make right at the aircraft,” French said.
Several future projects are under consideration. French explained that the NSF, based on merit reviews, in conjunction with UW, will make decisions on funding for projects typically six to eight months in advance, sometimes longer if the project is especially complex.