HAMPTON, Va. (WAVY) — The General Electric Aerospace’s 747 is one big plane, and after seeing it, you can understand why it has the nickname, Queen of the Skies.
If you’ve never been on this plane before, here’s the specs: It’s more than 230 feet long and has a wing span of nearly 210 feet.
Inside the aircraft, you can see it was converted when GE bought it for research, and that’s why it’s here today.
“This week we were up generating contrails, and NASA was flying around, scanning those contrails with a LIDAR instrument as part of our RISE program to help understand how contrails are formed and how our designs in the future can help mitigate them and the potential impacts that they have relative to climate driven,” said Nate Kamps, GE Aerospace flight test engineer.
Airplane contrails develop near the engines. When you see a plane creating them, it’s the leftover water vapor from the process of the engine leaving behind warm and humid air in a cold environment. It’s just like on a cold winter day when you see the exhaust smoke from the tailpipe from the car in front of you. Researchers at NASA Langley have partnered with GE to study them using their light detecting and ranging on board the Gulfstream III.
“So we’re using NASA’s state of the art high altitude LIDAR, which shoots a laser beam down below the aircraft and measures the light that’s scattered back by the atmosphere,” said Richard Moore, scientist with NASA Langley Research Center. “And so that includes atmospheric layers of moisture that we expect to be conducive for contrail formation.”
The flight campaign is over, but scientists will keep studying the data and learn more so we can make our next flight even more efficient.
