Having the opportunity to fly in a jet is not something that happens every day; neither is sharing that experience with an amazing group of people. The UND Cessna Citation II Research Aircraft has an open seat, Additional Crew Member (ACM), for whoever wants to take a sneak peak into the Oklahoma sky and into the world of scientific flight. Prior to takeoff, the ACM receives a checklist with instructions that need to be followed during the mission. Basically, the task is to be aware of the real-time display of the CPI (Cloud Particle Imager), UHSAS (Ultra High Sensitivity Aerosol Spectrometer), and HVPS-3 (High Volume Precipitation Spectrometer). Each instrument has a common monitor that allows you to see the different instruments, and all the ACM has to do is simply push a numbered button on the control monitor. At first this looks like an easy task, but for me it was a great challenge to control my short-term memory and keep track of each instrument’s number. Little did I know they were in order and with their name on a label….

Flight mission day starts with a call from the mission scientist to the airport giving the ‘OK’ to fly. Until that happens the waiting time can be quite long, but the great hospitality of the UND crew and the magical interpretation of “O Ken Karenga” by Tony “always in tune” Grainger assures that everyone in the airport has a good time.

I can describe my flight experience as first, being glued to the floor while being as close as possible to the pilots to stare at all the instruments in the cockpit, with particular interest in the on-board radar. Then, testing my reflexes by taking off my headphones as soon as possible when we flew too close to electrical activity (in some occasions, the effect of lightning in the headset was so loud that even if I held them as far as my arm could reach I could still hear that screeching sound quite clearly), and finally, looking out the window and thinking of a happy place to calm down my stomach while the UND Citation did some nice spirals around the Central Facility. 🙂

This was a nocturnal flight, so I thought it wasn’t going to be a visually attractive one, but the clouds illuminated by the full moon and lightning on our way back to the airport quickly proved me wrong. End result: this experience will be a hard one to forget and for all good reasons.

Submitted by Paloma Borque, graduate student, McGill University