Page 8 - Volume 11 Number 8

A team of NOAA aviators captured this image showing before and after in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The aftermath photo was taken after Hurricane Matthew moved through the
area in 2016 and used specialized remote-sensing cameras aboard King Air N68RF flying at an altitude between 2,000-3,000 feet. (PHOTO: NOAA)
with the camera door, so when we took it back to Avcon to have that looked at we explained that the CG on the plane was so far aft that we couldn’t put fuel in the ER tanks and accomplish the mission that we wanted to accomplish. The fix ended up being taking a lot of the avionics equipment out of the aft bay and moving it into the forward avionics bay and the nose, and also putting some ballast weight up there.”
‘King of the Road’
Because of those adjustments, the aircraft didn’t actually enter service until March 2010 when it began flying missions from Puerto Rico to assess damage caused by the earthquake in Haiti.
In the seven years since, NOAA’s King Air 350CER has accumulated 3,972 hours, or roughly 560 hours per year. There is rarely a time when the King Air returns to the AOC to remain idle because it is in between projects, like some of the other NOAA fleet aircraft. The airplane is almost always in action – on the road – so the crew came up with the slogan “King of the Road” that it wears on a patch on their flight suits.
Most of the King Air’s hours have come from conducting coastal mapping for the Remote Sensing Division, which creates nautical charts used by a variety of agencies and companies, including commercial fisherman. Other hours come from flying emergency response missions to collect aerial imagery following destructive events such
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as tornadoes, hurricanes making landfall or flooding events that agencies like FEMA could then use to assess damage paying claims and providing support.
Sweeney describes the emergency response missions as an extension of the coastal mapping missions: both are about getting vital imagery but the circumstances are very different. On mapping flights, the pilots are chasing great weather and ideal conditions (no cloud cover, tide has to be just right, optimal sun angle) for capturing useful images. The flights typically take them to beautiful settings. In contrast, flights to support an emergency such as a hurricane can take the pilots into terrible weather. Rather than taking their time to get just the right images, they need to collect the data quickly and get it to the agencies waiting for it.
“We might be providing images for FEMA to decide if they need to evacuate an area or let homeowners return,” Sweeney said, adding that FEMA will use the images during and after an event. “FEMA typically would have to send out assessors to a disaster area to go house-to-house to assess the levels of damage. That’s very expensive for them to send people out on the ground. Our imagery allows them to look at an entire neighborhood at once and make those assessments much faster and at less expense.”
In 2016, NOAA’s King Air 350CER supported severe flooding in Louisiana in August and in October flew missions to survey the aftermath of Hurricane Matthew and to monitor river flooding in North Carolina caused by heavy rain from the dissipated hurricane.
A typical crew on the King Air 350CER is two pilots and one sensor operator; the AOC has seven pilots qualified to fly the King Air and two sensor operators assigned to work onboard. Most pilots, like Sweeney, will fly one of the hurricane hunters as well as one of the smaller platforms. The difference of flying conditions between the aircraft is significant as is the difference in flying the two main missions of the King Air 350CER.
“The emergency response flights can be very disheartening when you’re flying over vast areas of flooding or destruction and you’re typically flying in when there is still lingering weather in the area,” Sweeney said. “On the other hand, the coastal mapping is great, it’s almost all shoreline settings in nice, scenic areas with perfect weather conditions.” KA
AUGUST 2017