Published Tuesday, April 15, 2008 8:53 AM
Updated Tuesday, April 15, 2008 8:54 AM
Duke University Principal Investigator Ronnie Avissar took his project helicopter back to Durham, N.C., last Wednesday.
Duke University Principal Investigator Ronnie Avissar flies the helicopter low to the ground on its maiden flight to gain speed, which will help the helicopter gain lift, last Wednesday. The specially-outfitted helicopter came within 140 pounds of its maximum weight limit with Avissar at the controls, Boxell Helicopters President Lance Syner at co-pilot, and the extra climate-monitoring equipment.
Lift off
The blue helicopter's blades whirred like a swarm of locusts, lifting the chopper gently. As the skids left the ground, the mobile climate-monitoring machine bobbed slightly in mid air above the Berkeley County Airport tarmac.
"She's heavy. Real heavy," Dave Monroe said. Monroe is director of maintenance at Berkeley County-based Boxell Helicopters, which assembled the heavy research equipment onto the helicopter owned by Duke University. Last Wednesday marked the machine's maiden flight.
To gain more lift with its heavy load, the helicopter flew low to the ground to increase speed. Within seconds, the craft was 500 feet in the air.
When the helicopter touched down after 20 minutes, pilot and Duke University Principal Investigator Ronnie Avissar hopped out and said: "It has been six months – I'm taking my baby home."
Within a few hours of the test flight, Avissar and Boxell Helicopters President Lance Syner were flying the helicopter to Duke campus in Durham, N.C.
The helicopter is part of the Duke University Pratt School of Engineering Helicopter Observation Platform, which began two years ago with the goal to observe the atmospheric interaction of gases in relation to climate change.
“(The program will) improve our knowledge of the climate system so we can do a better climate prediction,” Avissar said. “The helicopter is crucial for any good research to do with greenhouse gases.”
According to Avissar, the most effective tool for evaluating climate in relation to air particulates and gases, such as carbon dioxide, is a helicopter that can track the variations from location to location and fly slow at low altitudes, unlike a stationary platform or an airplane.
“There is no other platform like that in the world,” Avissar said.
Years of research and months of toiling depended on the success of last Wednesday’s test flight. Now, a library of books could be written about the unprecedented data the helicopter will gather, Syner said.
On Dec. 1, the helicopter touched ground at the airport outside of Moncks Corner. It was around the same time that the Boxell Helicopters team moved from Johns Island to Berkeley County.
Within the course of several months, Boxell Helicopters, joined by Johns Island-based CCR Inc., researched and developed ways to make the helicopter fly with expensive and sensitive equipment.
Boxell rewired and modified the helicopter, and CCR designed and manufactured components and parts necessary for the equipment to be mounted underneath the helicopter.
The final product is sparse in luxury. Sitting in the hangar on a shelf were the remnants of comfort: carpet, a backseat, side steps and more.
They had been removed all in the name of the weight game.
Helicopters cannot fly if they are too heavy, and this helicopter has a lot of equipment to carry. A truck came on Wednesday to move the extra parts up to Durham.
“We’re fighting a weight battle,” Syner said. “As we add more components to the aircraft, we have to find ways to trim weight.”
For Wednesday's test flight, the helicopter came within 140 pounds of its maximum weight capacity.
"It's reasonable," Avissar said. "It's supposed to be this way ... (Boxell was) able to manufacture it pretty light."
Once the chopper set down in North Carolina, the team at Duke University still has work to do prior to field operations with the helicopter.
"We still have a little bit of work to do with the software and the computers," Avissar said. "We'll probably start using it for some sort of demonstration flight in about a week."
He added: "The problem is it's a prototype which means nothing can be expected."
The helicopter's first two missions include data collection at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina and data collection near Durham. After the data is collected over a 10-day period, it could take up to a year for Duke University to fully discover the scientific value through research, Avissar said. The helicopter can collect one megabyte of data per second.
"Just to go through that takes a huge amount of time and effort," Avissar said.
To find out more about upcoming climate-monitoring projects with the helicopter, visit the Helicopter Observation Platform Web site: http://hop.pratt.duke.edu.
Lindsay Street is a staff writer with the Berkeley Independent. Contact her at 572-0511 or lstreet@berkeleyind.com.