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[music] Narrator: Operation IceBridge has arrived

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at Thule Air Base to kick off this year’s survey of Arctic sea ice 

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and the ice sheets and glaciers of Greenland. But just a week ago 

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they were still at Wallops Flight Facility outfitting a brand new aircraft

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for the trip.Actually the NASA C-130

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four-engine turboprop cargo plane has seen five decades of service, 

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but it’s a new aircraft to IceBridge. With its distinctive nose, 

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elevated cockpit, and open cabin, it’s a change of pace for the team, 

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but functionally, it’s built to do the job.

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Sonntag: Yeah, so the C-130 it's an interesting aircraft … Again this one for us is a new airplane.

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It's about my age, actually, but Wallops just got it about a year ago. 

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First time we've installed in it. It has some advantages, some disadvantages

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over the P-3 that we normally take to Greenland. Pretty similar performance really. Roughly similar range roughly similar 

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ground speed, maneuverability characteristics that sort of thing.

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Narrator: For the past few months, the Wallops and IceBridge teams have been busy 

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making sure the aircraft is properly configured for the mission’s many laser, 

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radar, and photographic instruments.

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Sonntag: That was a long road -- it's always a big deal putting all these instruments -- there's a whole suite of them on board

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what to us is a new airplane. A lot of design work, a lot of machining, a lot of cutting

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of metal, a lot of re-designing and re-machine work and re-cutting of metal 

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when the first one doesn't always work out like we hoped. 

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Once we're modularized and designed into the system it'll be pretty easy, but the first time is hard 

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and that's what's been an issue with this particular deployment because all 

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all of our optical instruments have to be machined to fit to look out a 

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particular viewport in the bottom. All the wiring has to work. 

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The equipment you see behind me here which is precise navigation equipment

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which helps us put the airplane directly underneath the satellite path 

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or directly over one of our previous paths from IceBridge all that has to be wired into the system, 

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tested, flight-tested and that's what we're in the process of doing now. 

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Narrator: One week later, with all test flights a success, 

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IceBridge is now 6,000 miles to the north, already has its first flight in the books, 

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and will be flying out of Greenland and Fairbanks, Alaska for the next two months.

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[music]