We were ready for a Airbus Perlan Mission II Dress Rehearsal yesterday, before the snow arrived today. For the past few days the Perlan Team has fine tuned all glider systems and support teams. Tim Gardner and John Kregl replaced a control rod end in the wing. With two 100 amp hour batteries from Battle Born Batteries from Reno we made a fresh weight and balance. Their motto revised: “Get Up There, Stay Up There.” We re-taped, filled the air supply bottle, the O2 bottle, checked the heaters for the eyeball window plenums, found and fixed a small leak in pitot statics, streamlined camera procedures, loaded CubeSats in their rack in the Science bay, and made fresh, thin, insulated pads (yoga mats) for each cockpit.
We hosted a meeting about Search and Rescue in the unlikely event of an outlanding. Multiple agencies were represented and all were very supportive. We tested the satellite phones donated by Iridium and the inReaches donated by Garmin. And of course we celebrated Tago’s birthday. All he’s ever asked for was a World Record on his birthday.
The July 31 snow was lovely, but non-flyable of course. The low overcast completely precluded our flying. We don’t want to pass through a cloud EVER, not even for Tago!
For today’s 1:20 video collage please see Perlan’s YouTube channel:
