The Financial Times Limited
Financial Times (London)
October 9, 1999, Saturday LONDON EDITION 1
SECTION: WORLD NEWS; Pg. 07
Soviet-era spyplane spies on ozone hole
by Ken Warn in Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego
Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego
The M55-Geophysica spy-plane was once the pride of the Soviet secret
services, unknown outside intelligence circles and unlisted in aircraft
reference works.
But the hush-hush high-altitude aircraft has come out of the shadows, if not out of the cold. The M55 will this month complete a series of scientific flights over Antarctica in an Italian-led project to find out more about the hole in the earth's ozone layer, and help predict its likely pace of recovery.
Last month the M55 completed a six-stage, 11-day odyssey from Moscow to Ushuaia, at the southern tip of Argentina. Just getting the M55 to Ushuaia, the world's southernmost city, and keeping it operational, has posed a series of challenges for the team of 70 technicians and scientists.
The project - the Airborne Polar Experiment-Geophysica Aircraft in Antarctica (APE-GAIA) - has been backed by about euro 10m (£6.5m) of funding from the European Union and individual European countries. It has involved the participation and goodwill of scientists, technicians and officials from countries including Russia, Germany, Britain, Spain, Finland, Switzerland, the US, Argentina, Brazil and Chile, under the auspices of the Italian Antarctic Research Progamme.
"Only the Italians could negotiate their way through all this," said Bruno
Carli, scientific head of the project.
The end of the Cold War, and the former Soviet defence establishment's
desperate need for cash, led the Russians to offer the aircraft for leasing,
making the project possible.
Technicians from the Myasishchev Design Bureau (MDB), the company which built the aircraft for the Soviet Defence Ministry in 1988, worked overtime in often difficult circumstances to adapt the aircraft to take its new payload of complex scientific equipment.
The experiment suffered a financial setback when one of the instalments on the five-year lease failed to reach MDB. The Russian bank handling the transaction had collapsed.
The M55 also flew into squalls when it arrived in Argentina. The aircraft's hangar was only partially completed, and doorless, leaving the equipment at the mercy of the sub-zero temperatures of Tierra del Fuego. However, a last-minute agreement between the contractor and the cash-strapped provincial government meant the hangar was ready for operations in time.
Even with its newly installed doors, the hangar is chilly. Quilts, and the heat from strategically placed desk lamps, are used to keep some of the sensitive equipment from freezing. "These are campaign solutions," said logistics chief Mr Giuseppe De Rossi, rubbing his hands to keep warm.
The sorties over the Antarctic are the culmination of a four-year campaign of modifications, test flights and an initial series of scientific flights over the Arctic.
Two pilots take it in turns to don space suits and fly the partially pressurised, long wing-span M55 at an altitude of up to 20km above Antarctica - and to land it in the often dangerous cross-winds.
The experiment is not the first to use a spyplane to study the ozone hole. The US ER-2 stratospheric aircraft, a modified version of the U2 spy plane, was used in two previous campaigns. But the twin-engined M55 can carry more equipment, allowing both the sampling of the air immediately around the aircraft and the use of remote sensing techniques.
With the phasing out of ozone-damaging CFC gases, the ozone layer should revert to the condition of the late 1970s by 2050, said Mr Carli. "But there are still several approximations in this estimate, and the aim of this campaign is to improve our understanding of the processes involved."
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
LOAD-DATE: October 09, 1999
Financial Times (London)
October 9, 1999, Saturday LONDON EDITION 1
SECTION: WORLD NEWS; Pg. 07
Soviet-era spyplane spies on ozone hole
by Ken Warn in Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego
Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego
The M55-Geophysica spy-plane was once the pride of the Soviet secret
services, unknown outside intelligence circles and unlisted in aircraft
reference works.
But the hush-hush high-altitude aircraft has come out of the shadows, if not out of the cold. The M55 will this month complete a series of scientific flights over Antarctica in an Italian-led project to find out more about the hole in the earth's ozone layer, and help predict its likely pace of recovery.
Last month the M55 completed a six-stage, 11-day odyssey from Moscow to Ushuaia, at the southern tip of Argentina. Just getting the M55 to Ushuaia, the world's southernmost city, and keeping it operational, has posed a series of challenges for the team of 70 technicians and scientists.
The project - the Airborne Polar Experiment-Geophysica Aircraft in Antarctica (APE-GAIA) - has been backed by about euro 10m (£6.5m) of funding from the European Union and individual European countries. It has involved the participation and goodwill of scientists, technicians and officials from countries including Russia, Germany, Britain, Spain, Finland, Switzerland, the US, Argentina, Brazil and Chile, under the auspices of the Italian Antarctic Research Progamme.
"Only the Italians could negotiate their way through all this," said Bruno
Carli, scientific head of the project.
The end of the Cold War, and the former Soviet defence establishment's
desperate need for cash, led the Russians to offer the aircraft for leasing,
making the project possible.
Technicians from the Myasishchev Design Bureau (MDB), the company which built the aircraft for the Soviet Defence Ministry in 1988, worked overtime in often difficult circumstances to adapt the aircraft to take its new payload of complex scientific equipment.
The experiment suffered a financial setback when one of the instalments on the five-year lease failed to reach MDB. The Russian bank handling the transaction had collapsed.
The M55 also flew into squalls when it arrived in Argentina. The aircraft's hangar was only partially completed, and doorless, leaving the equipment at the mercy of the sub-zero temperatures of Tierra del Fuego. However, a last-minute agreement between the contractor and the cash-strapped provincial government meant the hangar was ready for operations in time.
Even with its newly installed doors, the hangar is chilly. Quilts, and the heat from strategically placed desk lamps, are used to keep some of the sensitive equipment from freezing. "These are campaign solutions," said logistics chief Mr Giuseppe De Rossi, rubbing his hands to keep warm.
The sorties over the Antarctic are the culmination of a four-year campaign of modifications, test flights and an initial series of scientific flights over the Arctic.
Two pilots take it in turns to don space suits and fly the partially pressurised, long wing-span M55 at an altitude of up to 20km above Antarctica - and to land it in the often dangerous cross-winds.
The experiment is not the first to use a spyplane to study the ozone hole. The US ER-2 stratospheric aircraft, a modified version of the U2 spy plane, was used in two previous campaigns. But the twin-engined M55 can carry more equipment, allowing both the sampling of the air immediately around the aircraft and the use of remote sensing techniques.
With the phasing out of ozone-damaging CFC gases, the ozone layer should revert to the condition of the late 1970s by 2050, said Mr Carli. "But there are still several approximations in this estimate, and the aim of this campaign is to improve our understanding of the processes involved."
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
LOAD-DATE: October 09, 1999
