After some a few setbacks and delays, we finally left Wallops Island on Saturday afternoon to head to Fairbanks (via Spokane, Washington). Originally scheduled to leave earlier in the week, we had to wait for some equipment from Colorado to be installed at the last moment. Here is a summary of what has happened since….

On Saturday we waited around for the P-3 maintenance to finish. There was a problem with some kind of valve related to the pitch of the prop on the #1 engine (details, details) that needed to be repaired from the test flight the day before, and it didn’t look like it would get finished in time to leave until Sunday. We did end up leaving even after a “no-go” from the pilots and mission manager (and a lot of speculation on our part).

The flight to Spokane took longer than expected due to the 100+ knot headwind..we were expected to fly for 6 hours or so, but ended up being more like 8 hours instead (for a while there I thought we would be landing in Montana). As soon as we arrived in Spokane it started snowing (and snowed all through the night!).

A few Alaskan Ambers later and a night of bad sleep, we were off to Fairbanks.

We did run into a small snag on the way out to the runway – one of the instruments uses nitrogen to operate properly, and for some reason there was no nitrogen in any of the tanks. An hour or so later, we had a new bottle of nitrogen and were on our way anyway…

The flight to Fairbanks was fast (5 hours) and we immediately set up the GPS ground station on the roof of the hangar (I’ll be posting pictures soon of the hangar and surrounding airplanes – lots of old planes laying around in pieces). We had the next day off (well, not off, we just didn’t fly).

Tuesday was the first scheduled flight day, but in the morning an engine part problem prevented us from taking off… better luck tomorrow!