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Facility has put aircraft, missiles, tires and even a skunk to the test: Eglin lab that emulates weather extremes turns 60(Northwest Florida Daily News (Fort Walton Beach) (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) May 6--EGLIN AFB -- New York City the Empire State Building. Chicago has the Sears Tower. Destin has Emerald Grande. If a building can symbolize a place, Eglin Air Force Base has the McKinley Climatic Laboratory. Opened in 1947 and occasionally faced with being closed to save the Air Force money, the facility -- a complex of testing chambers, small and cavernous -- is named after Col. Ashley C. McKinley, the father of simulated weather testing. May 24 will mark the 60th anniversary of the lab's first test -- a successful effort to mimic Arctic conditions. Engineers and technicians froze a B-29 bomber, a C-82 transport, a trio of fighters, a helicopter, a truck, a tank and clothing during the test. The temperature sometimes dropped to minus-70 degrees Fahrenheit. The man-made weather test was done in McKinley's main chamber, which now occupies roughly 3.3 million cubic feet. It's four stories tall and big enough to enclose a 747 jumbojet or the military's largest transport, the C-5. The Galaxy has a wingspan of almost 223 feet and a length of about 247 feet, and it's some 65 feet tall. Weather on demand Temperatures in the main chamber and the facility's second-largest room, the equipment test chamber, can drop to minus-65 degrees or soar to 165 degrees. During a test called "thermal shock," going from very low temperature to very high could happen in some 15 minutes. The phenomenon is tough on the hardware being tested and it's tough on the main chamber, a structure supported by steel girders and concrete columns. "You'll hear all sorts of noises coming from the walls," said McKinley chief Kirk Velasco. "You stand there and it makes you a little nervous, actually." The building is designed to expand and contract with the weather conditions being produced inside. The Air Force markets McKinley, which is run by the 46th Test Wing, to commercial users in an assortment of industries. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. has tested one of its high-end radials on McKinley snow. The military exposes gear from Army tents to Air Force B-2 bombers to heat, rain, fog, sandstorms and polar freezing. An advanced cruise missile that would carry a nuclear warhead was tested in mid-2006 in one of McKinley's smaller chambers. "When we fly the missiles for real at a test range, the weather needs to be perfect," the colonel in charge of the testing said to a 96th Air Base Wing spokeswoman. "Here, it's just the lab's availability, and we can also evaluate the missile's performance under other-than-perfect conditions, such as rain, icing and extreme temperatures." Even NASA uses the climatic laboratory to test space shuttle parts. In an April 6 letter to U.S. Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., signed by NASA administrator Michael D. Griffin, the agency noted it "utilized the McKinley Climatic Lab at Eglin AFB recently to perform thermal qualification testing for the Space Shuttle external tank bipod redesign, as well as the (liquid oxygen) feedline bellows heater." Other tests would probably be needed. McKinley is registered as a national landmark. In the mid-1990s, it went through a threeyear, $75 million renovation. The climatic laboratory doesn't have a line-item budget, according to an Eglin spokeswoman. McKinley operating costs are folded into the test wing's allotment. However, when Eglin's parent unit, Air Force Materiel Command, looked into closing the facility in 2003, it listed McKinley's operating cost during the preceding five years as between $3.5 million and $4.8 million. It's unclear if that range reflects the difference between the cost of running McKinley and the money it recoups from customers. A typical cold-temperature test -- the most popular type at McKinley -- might cost between $8,000 and $20,000 daily, depending on the weather options requested by a customer, Velasco said. He stressed there's substantial variation in lease rates based on test duration, environmental conditions ordered and the type of machines or gear going through the weather wringer. The climatic laboratory has a colorful past. It's a dearly defended facility. The Air Force proposal in 2003 to shutter or inactivate McKinley was resisted successfully. Its future is once again up in the air as the Air Force tries to re-channel money to buy warplanes and help pay for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. A decision might not be made for months. A May 23, 1957, story in the Playground News celebrates the lab's 10th anniversary with a headline, "What happened to the Skunk at 65 Below?" It seems during the first "temperature rundown" at the then-Climatic Projects Hangar, a skunk scurried into the facility and couldn't be caught. The test had to go on. "It was expected that there would be one slightly deep frozen skunk at the end of the test," the story read, "but, to the surprise of many, when the thaw came a few days later the little animal walked out of his hiding place with a look of complacency." There was another incident at the climatic laboratory that would have drawn the ire of People for Ethical Treatment of Animals had it existed back then. The Air Force climate- and altitude-tested a mule. It learned mules, or at least the one borrowed from a Crestview farm, subjected to cold soaks sometimes with snow can survive at minus-20 degrees, according to the Playground News. The service also wanted to know if mules could be airlifted -- yes, as it turned out -- to locations where they could be used as pack animals. Currently, two civilian executive jets produced by Hawker Beechcraft Corp. are enduring cold- and high-temperature testing. The "hot soaks" include exposure to banks of lights simulating the sun's "heat load." Before the Hawker contract, McKinley crews cold-soaked an F-22 fighter. Along with warplanes, they expose a vast assortment of military gear to artificial weather. Not too long ago, an entire Army command and control tent city, including three Humvees, was erected and battered in the main chamber. "Every significant piece of military equipment is still required to go through environmental testing," Velasco said. "We do a lot of sand and dust storm testing lately, for obvious reasons." Meteorology magic The vast McKinley complex -- it has a dedicated electricity substation -- is an enduring marvel of mechanical engineering and chemistry. "The basic (method) in how we heat and cool the chambers hasn't changed in 60 years," Velasco said. Two-story refrigeration units pump a coolant through coils washed by air drawn from the main chamber through fans housed in their own rooms. The cooled air is returned to the main or equipment test chambers to help create weather conditions such as snow, freezing rain and salt fog. Weather conditions can be manipulated from barely inclement to severe. For example, McKinley crews can simulate three ice cloud scenarios, including one that can be used by aircraft engine manufacturers to meet Federal Aviation Administration certification. If heat, not cold, is desired, the facility relies on water boilers to produce steam. It's used to warm air drawn from the two climatecontrolled chambers. The heated air is then pumped back to aid simulating conditions that might be encountered on a flightline in a tropical country or desert air base. The environmental testing process is managed by small teams of operators working in the main control room, a compact space in the belly of the main chamber building. The control room is manned around the clock. Oversized computer screens and a wall-sized schematic with switches to start and stop the facility's machinery fill the work space. One of McKinley's crucial features and principal marketing tools is its capacity to test running jet engines. Their exhaust is ducted out the back of each chamber and the air they suck replaced by one of two Air Make-Up Systems. It's not enough to simply ventilate a chamber because test conditions such as low or higher temperature would be difficult to maintain. So, AMUs pump conditioned air -- it's hot or cold, depending on the test -- into the chambers. AMU System 2 features a blower the diameter of a tanker truck trailer. It feeds air into a duct that, at its widest, looks like it could accommodate two, maybe three, cars parked side by side. Air leaving the duct flows over three 3-story banks of coils. Depending on which set is used, the coils cool or heat the air. Velasco said cold-soak testing in the middle of summer can produce a cascade of water -- almost a waterfall -- between the first and second set of towering cooling coils because the process dehumidifies the air. There's no evidence de-humidifying has produced salmon runs. Chilled air entering another duct that leads to the main chamber can be moving at 70 mph if the test demands very low temperatures. McKinley's uniqueness means military and commercial customers have to book the place well in advance. Velasco suggests two years in advance for the main chamber and seven to nine months for the equipment test chamber. He added the climatic laboratory has clients scheduled through 2013. "There's always going to be a need for (weather) testing," said the McKinley chief, who has worked there about 23 years. "We definitely stay busy." Copyright (c) 2007, Northwest Florida Daily News, Fort Walton Beach Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For reprints, email [email protected], call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA. |