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Frontiers April 2016 Issue

Ocean U.S. Navy’s P-8A Poseidon proves itself in service, regardless of the mission BY VINETA PLUME | PHOTOS BY BOB FERGUSON hrough the windows of the flight deck, U.S. Navy Cmdr. Andrew Klosterman and Cmdr. T Edward Kribs look out into the shrubmottled, barren beige landscape of Fallon, Nev., like a scene out of Star Wars, Kribs notes. They begin to taxi a P-8A maritime patrol and reconnaissance aircraft, a hunter of submarines, toward a perpendicular runway framed by distant hills ahead. The pilots are here to test the aircraft’s high-pressure altitude performance. At nearly 4,000 feet (1,200 meters) above sea level, Fallon is far from the vast oceans over which the P-8A Poseidon typically reigns. They have no chance of achieving their mission. A third Navy pilot, Lt. Donnell Exum, has disengaged the aircraft’s flight-critical radar altimeter. And when a button overhead lights up red, indicating the failure, Klosterman and Kribs choose to stop, return the plane to the line and consult the maintenance crew. It’s the right decision, and just one in a series of eight simulated malfunctions and decision-making scenarios that Exum will use to challenge his students this morning 14 | BOEING FRONTIERS


Frontiers April 2016 Issue
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