Aircraft Integration

Today we arrived at Ellington Field around 7:15am to begin setting up for our Test Readiness Review. There was a morning briefing that two of my team members attended, while I helped get things set up and tested. We had about 2.5 hrs before our review in which we spent finishing preparing everything for flight.

The Test Readiness Review went very smoothly. I gave a brief presentation that introduced our team and went into a general overview of the experiment and how it worked. There was a large panel of NASA reviewers who asked us a few questions. Most of their questions were surprisingly structures related rather than electrical which we would have expected. There were a few minor changes they suggested but other than that everything checked out.

After the TRR we fixed a few things and waited until we could integrate our experiment onto the aircraft. The experiment was then loaded onto a forklift and lifted up to the C-9.

We were placed in the back of the plane by the seats so that we could be as far away from the arc welding experiment as possible. That experiment had to be in the front since they were using gas tanks.


We were able to easily bolt our structure to the floor of the plane unlike several of the teams there. Kansas had a lot of difficulty getting their experiment bolted down. The program director ended up spending over half an hour inside their box trying to get everything to fit. Once everything was bolted down we were able to hook up our accelerometer cable into the planes system and test it. We were getting some odd results but the z-acceleration seemed to be accurate, which is the axis we really care about.

As the experiment was integrated onto the aircraft the ground crew all worked to help fill the unit cells for day 1. Once we had them all filled and ready to be taken onto the plane, we found out that the aircraft still had to go out and fly a proficiency flight for the crew. This meant we couldn't load our cells until the morning of flight. We were a bit nervous about that since we knew it would take us at least an hour to load and we had been told there would be very minimal time before flight. The program director was great though and assured us we would be given the time we needed.

By the end of the day we were told the morning flight would be pushed back to the afternoon since there were some aircraft issues and a few of the teams had things break or not working so they still weren't integrated yet. This meant the proficiency flight was going to go in the morning and then we'd be able to load and fly in the afternoon. Since our experiment was all ready to go, we had the rest of the evening off. A few of us went to Red Lobster for dinner with the adviser from the Michigan Tech team. The food was delicious. After dinner we had a quick meeting to get the flyers prepared for the next day. Our experiment was looking to be in the best shape of anyones at this point.