Stomach private lab: Lufthansa’s research-based Airbus A350 starts with a delay

At the end of 2021, the Lufthansa Airbus A350 is supposed to take off from Munich on flights for the Climate Research Service – initially over southern Germany. However, the launch of the D-AIXJ (named Erfurt), which had been selected as a research aircraft, was delayed. Only now has the aircraft completed its first test flight.

However, it worked, according to the Lufthansa report. According to the airline, a measuring probe system developed specifically for the project was attached to the underbody of an Airbus A350 and was successfully tested over Bavaria. It has sensors for high-frequency, high-precision pressure and temperature measurement. It also collects other data.

Probe in the torso, lab in the abdomen

In the future, Lufthansa’s Airbus A350 special mission will be to measure about 100 different trace gases, aerosols, and cloud parameters in the tropopause (at an altitude of 9 to 13 kilometers). In the next few months, the airline, together with the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology KIT, will build a specially developed measurement laboratory with about 20 well-equipped two-ton instruments. It is loaded into the cargo hold as a cargo container and connected to the instrumentation system on the aircraft’s external structure. It’s called the Caribbean. The abbreviation stands for civil aircraft for regular atmospheric investigation based on instrument enclosure.

Lufthansa’s A350 research will not only do this on special missions, but on regular long haul flights. However, the measuring container will not always be there, but it is brought on board flights of particular interest for research. “With high-resolution measurements of many parameters, we can understand which atmospheric processes are changing and how the climate is changing, in a high-altitude region where the majority of the atmospheric radiation budget, i.e. the greenhouse effect, is generated and changed. Study leader Andreas Zahn of KIT commented, We can use it to identify process-specific errors and their causes in climate models and thus improve their ability to make predictions.

The most accurate measurement system in the world

No other monitoring system in the world, neither on the ground nor on a satellite, can provide such high-resolution free-atmospheric multi-parameter data as the converted D-AIXJ, Zahn continues. According to recent planning, the first telemetry flights are scheduled for 2024. A Lufthansa spokesperson explains that the pandemic is also responsible for the delay. “At the same time, conversion is a unique and agile project globally. Never before has an Airbus A350 been so converted. So there is no fixed master plan. »