ATMOSPHERE & DLR Flight Experiments: Celebrating 10 years of collaboration !

While CAFE PACIFIC science mission is running in Australia, long standing ATMOSPHERE/DLR Flight Experiments collaboration is reaching its 10th years anniversary!

Back in January 2014, while Rémy was still jet-lagged from Airbus High Altitude Ice Crystal Australian campaign (already!), the latest PLANET software bug fixes on a USB stick in his pocket, Stefan was delving into HALO’s intimacy, making his way within weird Satcom interconnexions and analogue lines operation. All under Katrin’s close supervision... But the team was not to be stopped by such challenges! And HALO, short name for High Altitude and Long-Range Aircraft, was soon ready for ML-CIRRUS campaign, it’s very first PLANET empowered mission. Celebrated with a Beer, as required!

ACRIDICON, POLSTRACC and 25 more campaigns followed, with their own challenges and achievements. Together with DLR Flight Experiments team, we admired HALO’s fanciful maneuvers and unique operations: spiraling, dropping, waving, merging, and many more that this unique flying laboratory can handle.

Ten years later, we are proud to have contributed in some way to the research that DLR Flight Experiments and the science community has produced to better understand and preserve our Planet. We would never have imagined such a good match with our PLANET service!

Along the road, HALO, a Gulfstream G550 based platform, has been continuously improved to remain one of the best infrastructure available for flight science. In addition to incremental improvement of PLANET flight mission management service, such as Dropsondes data handling for instance, ATMOSPHERE notably helped DLR Flight Experiments to set-up a brand-new Satcom on HALO. Collaboration also extended to other DLR platforms, such as Cessna C-208B Grand Caravan, and Falcon-20 aircraft. More recently, PLANET product was fundamentally refurbished to offer ultimate user experience and reliability, while facilitating operation, maintenance and administration tasks. And other features will be soon available such as cellular and wifi communication for hangar and ground operations.

On the human side, Katrin, Andreas, Steve, Rémy, Stefan are still there. And many new people have stepped in: Thomas, Antonio, Tom, Adrien, Soundarya and others... All committed to support DLR Flight Experiments aircraft as the world’s best flight science platforms!

Principal Author: Jean Marc Gaubert, ATMOSPHERE