The rewards were worth the discomfort, Ball says, and not just because of the unique atmospheric chemistry dataset and scientific opportunities. Flying in the DC-8 allowed her to see the world. Ball’s missions included the Atmospheric Emissions and Reactions Observed from Megacities to Marine Areas campaign in summer 2023, which sampled air above big cities; this meant Ball rode in the plane as it made low passes by the Statue of Liberty. A similar campaign called ASIA-AQ early in 2024 took Ball across the Pacific Ocean to study the atmosphere above East Asian nations such as South Korea, Thailand, and the Philippines. “I’ve been able to see cities all over the world that I would not have gotten to see otherwise,” she says. “And I got to see them from pretty low altitudes.”
Similarly, flights for NASA’s Operation IceBridge mission throughout the 2010s carried Schaller to the far ends of the planet, with close passes over glaciers in Antarctica and Greenland. “One of my fondest memories is flying over the North Pole at about 1,500 feet while the Icebridge team was making measurements of the thickness of the sea,” she says. “I was leading a live chat with a classroom back in the United States, and they were asking if we saw Santa.”
Crounse has flown on nearly a dozen DC-8 research campaigns over the past two decades. One of the most memorable projects, he says, was the Atmospheric Tomography Mission from 2016 to 2018, during which the DC-8 circumnavigated the globe during each of the four seasons of the year. The missions took him to sites including Alaska, Hawaii, the Azores, Chile, and New Zealand. He also traveled over the western United States in 2019 to quantify the atmospheric impacts of major wildfires. “The airplane would go from its maximum altitude, which is somewhere around 12 kilometers, down to about 500 meters above the ocean,” he says. “And it would do that repeatedly throughout the whole flight. That dataset has proven invaluable for understanding the global atmosphere.”
The DC-8’s rugged nature—this was a tough, overbuilt machine, the scientists agree—helped it to withstand its many shaky trips through the atmospheric boundary layer, the lowest portion of the atmosphere affected by Earth’s surface. But even a durable plane does not last forever, especially when decades have passed since the last one was built. “Every time something breaks it’s just a big effort to find that part,” Boogaard says. “You can compare it to an old car.”