NASA’s P-3 departed from Wallops Flight Facility, Va., at 6:15 a.m., March 7, 2017, traveling to Thule Air Base in Greenland to support ice survey studies as part of the Operation IceBridge mission.
The spring IceBridge campaign will take the P-3 to Greenland, Norway, and Alaska over the next 10 weeks. The P-3 last flew with IceBridge on their 2013 Arctic campaign, during which the aircraft made flights out of both Kangerlussuaq and Thule, Greenland.
It’s the P-3’s first IceBridge mission with a new set of wings and tail. These upgrades, completed in 2016, will extend the life of NASA’s P-3 up to 40 years.
NASA’s P-3 is a four-engine turboprop based out of Wallops and capable of long duration flights of 8-12 hours. It is supporting the same suite of IceBridge instruments flown in the past IceBridge Arctic and Antarctic campaigns.
“The configuration of the NASA P-3 includes instrumentation attached to the aircraft as we maneuver this large vehicle approximately 1,500 feet above the surface, mimicking the satellite flight lines through the glacier flow,” said NASA pilot Mark Russell.
“We are excited to fly the IceBridge mission again from Wallops. We completed this mission in previous years, and now with the re-wing and new tail added to the P-3, the team is prepared and ready to go again,” said Wallops Aircraft Office Chief Werner Winz.
More information on Operation IceBridge is available at: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/icebridge/index.html
Sam Henry
NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility, Virginia
