Flight N°6: After 6 days on the ground, HALO is in the air again!

After 6 days on the ground, HALO and the crew left the hangar this morning to fly over Lloydminster, the so-called “Heavy Oil Capital of Canada“. This area has already been overflown since the beginning of this campaign (Flight N°1 link) and allows us to have additional data for validation.

Edmonton, 25.08.2022


Take part to the instruments and aircraft preparation before the flight this morning

The last minutes before take-off in HALO…

Soon everyone not flying should leave aircraft and the flight crew is boarding

Sebastian, operator of the CHARM-F instrument joined the team today and is making his first flight in Canada! Welcome to the team!

The front of the aircraft containing the remote sensing instruments: MAMAP-2DL from the Institute of Environmental Physics (IUP), Uni Bremen (first boxes) which measures the reflected sunlight and CHARM-F from the German Aerospace Center (rear) which measures the intensity of its backscattered emitted laser pulse.

Before each take-off, HALO is refilled while it stands on the apron and the instruments are warming up.


During the flights, spiral dives are made to collect samples at different altitudes and generate vertical profiles. We were flying over single oil facilities at this point, which can be recognized in the video by the lighter spots in the field.

Useless information

Lloydminster in Canada is probably best known for being Canada’s only border city. The city is unique in that it is the only town in Canada to straddle two provinces. It’s located in both Saskatchewan and Alberta. Fortunately for our planning both provinces are on the same timezone and we didn’t have to communicate with two different Air Traffic Controls.

Credits: nowiknow.com