You may be hearing some late night and early morning flights at Dobbins Air Reserve over the next couple months on a consistent basis.
Dobbins officials announced this week that one of NASA’s ER-2 high altitude research planes, part of the NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center, is deploying at the Marietta base through March 5.
Flights began on Thursday, and according to a release from Dobbins, “overland flying will be limited as much as possible between sunset and sunrise. But due to the nature of the mission, flights may also occur during evening hours and on weekends.”
Here’s more on why the ER-2 is flying out of Dobbins.
The ER-2 planes, originally built by the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation (now Lockheed Martin) as U-2 spy planes during the Cold War, track severe weather and measure wind, temperatures, precipitation, humidity and aerosols.
The flights are sponsored by the Earth Science Division of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, D.C.
The ER-2 flies at a range between 20,000 feet and 70,000 feet with a typical cruise speed of 410 knots. The distance of a normal 8-hour mission is 3,000 nautical miles, yielding seven hours of data.
The ER-2, according to a NASA information sheet, can carry a maximum payload of 2,600 pounds (1,179 kilograms) distributed in the equipment bay, nose area and wing pods.
The NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center is based at Palmdale, Calif. Here’s more about the NASA Airborne Science Program.
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