Polar 5 on a Satellite Mission

Today, Polar 5 started for a satellite mission having a date with Cloudsat and all the other satellite of the A-Train satellite constellation. Therefore, the flight plan had to be scheduled more precise then for other flights. The meeting was at 11:27 local time with about 1.5 hours flight time until the exact overpass. We aimed to follow the track for one hour having the meeting in the center of the leg. So everybody had to take the seat half an hour before start to guaranty no delay during the starting procedure. The training of the last flights helped and is morning Polar 5 needed only 20 min from starting the engines until take off.

Although we had beautiful sunny weather at the airport with high risk of getting sun burned, a lot of clouds where found on the satellite track.