Page 11 - Aerotech News and Review, Sept. 7 2018

FIRE, from 10
Howe explained the role of the Cali- fornia Air National Guard.
“The aircraft shows Cal Fire (the state’s arm of the U.S. Department of Forestry and Fire Protection), where the biggest threats to people and property are located, the hottest areas and those
parts of the fire that are most rapidly growing so they can deploy resources.” He was chosen for that role the week of Aug. 6 because of his familiarity with the MQ-9. Howe was one of the pilots of NASA’s Ikhana aircraft, a civilian variant of the MQ-9 based at
Armstrong until the aircraft was recent- ly reassigned. One of the Ikhana’s mis- sions, while based at Armstrong, was to validate technologies that could be used to monitor and map fires as they were happening during the Western States Fire Missions in 2006 and 2007.
The hours leading up to his first shift Aug.6 were eventful.
“The aircraft was coming back on my first night and the crew discovered a new fire between the Carr fire near Redding and the Mendocino fire,” he said. “The blaze that the crew sited be- came known as the Eel fire. They were
the first to spot it and report it to the Cal Fire commander.”
Howe watched the infrared imaging on big screen monitors in the opera- tions center, which is like a NASA con- trol room, and saw how the fires were being mapped out and communicated to Cal Fire’s command center.
“You can clearly see burn areas have a residual heat, even in the middle of the night, and the bright leading edge, like a string of jewels,” Howe said. “At the hottest part, you can see the flames licking off the top of it. It’s pretty intense.”
Huge columns of smoke rise from California’s Mendocino Complex fire. The smoke that has risen and drifted now clouds the skies above the state.
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NASA photograph
This false-color image was captured on Aug. 9, 2018, by an instrument installed aboard a NASA ER-2 research aircraft that flew over both fires making up the complex in the area around Clear Lake (the central, black feature) in northern California. Active fire zones are seen in yellow, with warm, burned areas in orange. Unburned vegetation appears in blue and green.
NASA photograph
NASA photograph by Carla Thomas
Scott Howe, a research pilot at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in California, assisted with monitoring California’s wildfires by operating a MQ-9 remotely piloted aircraft during launches and recoveries for the California Air National Guard. The MQ-9 closely resembles the Ikhana aircraft, in the background, which Howe had piloted at Armstrong.
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