Twin Otter Extended US Navy CIRPAS

This folder contains a repaint for the Aerosoft Twin Otter Extended, in the colors of 762256 (c/n 496). Formerly N83NX, this aircraft is registered with the US Navy, but flying for the Center for Interdiciplinary Remotely-Piloted Aircraft Studies (CIRPAS), a research center at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. The CIRPAS Twin Otter is an instrumented twin-engine turboprop aircraft. It supports individual scientists as well as teams of scientists from various Universities and Laboratories who are interested in lower-tropospheric phenomena and air/sea interaction. Payload may be selected from a large suite of state of the art meteorological, aerosol, and cloud particle sensors, while additional equipment collaborating scientists may wish to include can be integrated as well. Twin Otter mission have been sponsored by ONR, NSF, DOE, NOAA, NASA, CARB, and NRL.
Instruments may be installed in racks inside the cabin where a well characterized community inlet delivers ambient air samples, or in pods either suspended by wing-mounted pylons or mounted on a hard point on the cabin roof. Optical ports and windows are on the airplane’s belly and in the cabin roof.
CIRPAS staff calibrates and maintains the facility payload and provides fully reduced, synchronized, and coherent data sets to the collaborating scientists.
The Twin Otter is based at the CIRPAS Marina Facility, but has been deployed to various locations in North, South, and Central America and Asia. Repaint by Jan Kees Blom, based on the paintkit by Aerosoft.