INCAS King Air#
The CELLO team is conducting research flights with the Hawker Beechcraft King Air C90 GTx, which is operated by the Romanian National Institute for Aerospace Research INCAS. Details can be found on the EUFAR website.

Fig. 6 The INCAS King Air at Praia, Cabo Verde, during CELLO-ORCESTRA in August 2024.#
Instruments#
The CAPS and Hawkeye combination cloud probes are mounted on the underwing pylons of the aircraft and the data acquisition system is mounted in a custom-made rack inside the aircraft cabin.
SPEC Hawkeye
The Hawkeye is an airborne atmospheric research instrument (developed by SPEC) that combines the capabilities of the FCDP (Fast Cloud Droplet Probe), and the 3V-CPI, composed of the two channel 2D-S (Stereo Particle Imaging Probe) and a CPI (Cloud Particle Imager), specially developed for monitoring hydrometeors. The size range for each component of the Hawkeye probe are the following:
CPI |
2.3 μm - 2.5 mm |
2D-S 10μm |
10 μm - 1.28 mm |
2D-S 50μm |
50 μm - 6.4 mm |
FCDP |
1 μm - 50 μm |

DMT CAPS
The CAPS is a research instrument developed by DMT that combines three cloud hydrometeor measurement systems: a CAS (Cloud Aerosol Spectrometer with depolarization) measuring aerosol and cloud hydrometeor size distributions from 2 μm to 50 μm, a CIP (Cloud Imaging Probe) measuring hydrometeor size distributions from 25 μm to 1550 μm and LWC (LWC-100) measuring liquid water content from 0.01 g/m3 to 3 g/m3 along with aircraft velocity, atmospheric temperature and pressure.
