This time the Continental Micronesia Airlines flight made it in just fine. I went to the airport to greet Brad (and a couple of other replacements that I know). The Project Office has a pretty standard routine at this point: Load arrivals and their luggage into the stepvans; hand out information packets with bike and room keys; drive to PBQ and give them fifteen minutes to drop off luggage; drive to Building 1009 for a briefing; and hand out bikes. Brad was added to my room since I'm leaving.

Since we only have 24 hours to make a transition, Brad and I got rignt down to business. It's really astonishing how much detail I've been carrying around in my head when I start trying to explain what he needs to know. The worst thing seemed to be the schedule. If you've been following these comments, the original idea was to get started at 5:30 a.m., have a forecast briefing at 6:30 a.m., and a science planning meeting at 8:00 a.m. However, when there are morning flights planned, the science briefing is moved to 6:30 p.m. and the forecast briefing is held at 4:30 p.m. And, we still need to have an early morning forecast briefing that starts two and a half hours before flight time to make sure the weather is worth a flight. Oh yes, there's an abbreviated forecast briefing included in the science planning meeting. J. Mark Fair (Aeromet's lead meteorologist) has started to ask for the times in 24-hr clock to keep it straight (like 1830 instead of 6:30 p.m.). Anyway, today Brad was faced with a forecast briefing at 4:30 p.m., the science meeting at 6:30 p.m., and a call for a 4:30 a.m. forecast briefing tomorrow morning to support the planned 7:00 a.m. take-off.

Another transition that happened today was my official recommendation that we decommission the Meck radiosonde site. The Aeromet technicians worked on the system again yesterday, and determined that they had made progress, but that several critical pieces are probably still lacking in the containers of spare parts that were shipped in. This raised the interesting question of what the three personnel assigned to that operation should do. There are several possibilities, but I am sure that the project has plenty for them to do. Our staffing levels are pretty tight because classes are starting back in the States for students and professors, and few of them were able to stay to the end of the project. [As an aside, our scheduling was not a mistake. It was driven by the dates on which the Ronald H. Brown and aircraft were available in the summer time frame for participation in KWAJEX.] Reallocating staff looks like Brad's first issue!

A third transition involved the KWAJEX shirts for which I have been responsible. Two of the boxes made it to Kwaj two days after I did, but the third one dropped out of the system. After more than a month of fruitless discussions with the shipping operation at Travis Air Force Base, the Project Office told me today that we should proceed with filing a lost-shipment claim. Drat! After that claim is settled, we will re-produce the shirts and ship them to the people who ordered them. The only good I can see coming from this is that it opens the door for a second chance to order shirts for the people that didn't get them the first time. I brought my two KWAJEX shirts, but when the box didn't show up I promised myself not to wear them until everyone else had them. I did actually wear each one to a specific event, but otherwise they're going home in like-new condition. I do plan to wear one on the flight out tomorrow!

George Huffman