Temperature histories of commercial flights at severe conditions from GASP data

The thermal environment of commercial aircraft from a data set gathered during the Global Atmospheric Sampling Program (GASP) is studied. The data set covers a four-year period of measurements. The report presents plots of airplane location and speed and atmospheric temperature as functions of elapsed time for 35 extreme-condition flights, selected by minimum values of several temperature parameters. One of these parameters, the severity factor, is an approximation of the in-flight wing-tank temperature. Representative low-severity-factor flight histories may be useful for actual temperature-profile inputs to design and research studies. Comparison of the GASP atmospheric temperatures to interpolated temperatures from National Meteorological Center and Global Weather Central analysis fields shows that the analysis temperatures are slightly biased toward warmer than actual temperatures, particularly over oceans and at extreme conditions.