RF08

Today’s flight started out pretty well. We had one sonde that briefly lost GPS at launch, but it came back pretty quickly. There was also one partial fast fall, where the parachute seems to have opened around 650 mbar, and then the rest of the drop was good.

On the 29th sonde, it got stuck in the launcher again. From AVAPS, the first few data frames seemed good, and then I went to the next sonde which was coming up soon. Because the first sonde was stuck, the second one also got stuck and got crunched by the launcher. There is no way to get the gate valve to re-open if it’s only partially closed, so there was no way to push that sonde out. Scotty was able to get the first sonde free by shaking the plane around, and then on the descent we were able to get the second sonde free as well.

At this point we were down to about 13kft, but there were white caps in the water for the first time this flight so Dave Raymond wanted to get another sonde out. We were still just more than the required distance off shore, so the pilots let us drop one more sonde. This one was a successful drop, and apparently the lowest the pilots remember dropping from the GV.