Sunday, April 18, 2010

ZA003 headed cross country to Eglin Air Force Base

The third Dreamliner, ZA003, is at this moment flying to Eglin Air Force Base to take part in cold soak tests at the USAF's McKinley Climatic Laboratory. The 787 flew out of Boeing Field at 7:08AM PST for the 787s first cross country flight which should take about 5 hours or so even though Flightaware shows a flight time of 45 minutes...we knew the 787 is supposed to be fast but c'mon!



Flightblogger had revealed earlier this week that ZA003 would perform cold soak test at Eglin Air Force Base. I'm not sure how long it'll be there and what temperatures it will exposed to but they will run the 787s systems to see how they act in the extreme cold though I'm guessing they wouldn't run the engines or APU inside the lab.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Actually, the Mckinley Climactic Laboratory has facilities to run engines inside the lab. there is a massive air induction system to accomodate the delivery of enough conditioned air to run engines on a C-5A!! Obviously, this is supplemented by an exhaust ducting sytem......I don't know what power levels this can handle, but I know they at least can run at idle.

Uresh said...

Robert, thanks for the correction. I hope they can run everything inside the lab!