777-200LR Flight Test Journal: Archives

06 July 2005

Home base, and around the world

Kevin Nack

777-200LR Flight Test engineering manager

In my job I get to oversee the people who control the test plan and airplane configuration. It means I travel to places such as La Paz, Bolivia, where you have a 14,000 foot runway elevation - a good place to test high altitude start behavior of the engines.

In fact, we go all over the world - wherever we need certain conditions of weather and altitude or lay of the land around the airport. We typically fulfill the role of base manager on most remote tests - Edwards Air Force Base, for instance - or wherever the airplane and crew might go.

A 'base' means we're going to be there with people, rental cars, motel rooms, and with situations where a manager has to handle personnel issues that might come up. When you hit the ground, there are advance people that make sure everything is set up and it's as smooth a transition as possible. The manufacturing side makes sure the infrastructure is in place to handle the airplane and that it's secure and its upkeep needs are met.

It depends on the tests, but last time we went down to Edwards we had 65-70 people. It's a unique location with a very wide and long runway and a very low population around the airfield itself. The dry lake bed at Edwards adds a lot of confidence for risk mitigation and safety. When we're doing engine-out take-off testing with a low-angle climb, we know that for 15-20 miles you can climb straight out and there's not a single person below that flight path.

The U.S. Air Force is very active at Edwards and that drives a good bit of our operations. During the week, Air Force operations get going around 7:30 or 8 a.m., so we start engines at 5:15, to begin testing at sunrise, right around 5:30. We gave a tour of the new airplane to the Air Force test squadron there and they were thrilled to see it. They're very supportive of us and we try not to interfere with their activities.

Of course we've got challenges, but we usually have advance parties check them out before we get there. We don't go to an international location unless we've had someone on the ground there first. Wherever we do go, we make sure the airport can handle our size of airplane and we check the load-bearing capability of the ramps and runways before we leave home.

Now, one of the reasons we may need to go to rather obscure places is for auto-land testing. We may need to find a place that either lacks wind or is very windy. We'll go to Colorado Springs, for example, due to its high altitude to test the unique approach behavior of the airplane at higher altitude airports. We may go to Iceland because they've got instrument approaches to runways at basically all four points of the compass. They've got storm systems moving through quite often and depending on the wind direction and strength, we can get all required testing done in one place and at one time - head, tail and crosswinds.

Everybody on our team has a unique reason to be here. The same things that make the job difficult are what make it rewarding. For an engineer, the job is unique because on a gray day in Seattle you can go out on a test flight, climb up above the clouds and be in the sunshine for a few hours.

Beyond that is the challenge and excitement of testing the newest technology in the world!