Marineland Right Whale Project takes to the sky with specialty aircraft

While volunteers with the Marineland Right Whale Project take to the beaches in the winter months each year to spot the right whales that grace the waters off northeast Florida’s coast, one small group from the team routinely takes to the sky in order to identify the whales.

Right whales, explained project coordinator JoyHampp, are best identified by photographing the pattern of white spots, or callosities, on the tops of their heads, and that’s not easily done from the beach.

“The best way to get that is from the air,” Hampp explained Friday while standing in a hangar in Hastings, showing off the tool she has been using for years in that effort.

It’s called an AirCam, an aircraft designed by Floridian Phil Lockwood, who sells the kits for the plane through his company, Lockwood Aviation in Sebring.

Hampp explained that Lockwood originally developed the aircraft for shooting photos for National Geographic over the rainforests of Congo.

He quickly realized, she said, that if he were to try that in a single-engine aircraft, if something went wrong, the chances of him being recovered would be slim.

So he designed a lightweight, twin-engine craft with wings set back well behind the cockpit so the pilot and a spotter or photographer — seated behind the pilot — can easily see out and below.

Designed with wings with a relatively large surface area, the plane, Hampp explained, is “a specialty low and slow aircraft” that can be flown at “altitudes you wouldn’t dream of flying a single-engine aircraft.”

“This was set up as a photographic platform,” she said.

And a safe one at that.

With the two engines operating completely independently of each other, and its lightweight design, the AirCam can fly safely on one engine, should the other go down.

“You know whatever happens if you lose an engine you are going to get someplace where you can land safely,” Hampp said.

What was good enough for the Congo, it turns out, was good enough for flying off Florida’s coast.

The Marineland Right Whale Project acquired its own AirCam in 2006, but Hampp was hooked on the planes long before that.

Hampp said that Jim Hain, senior scientist with the project, had been interested in adding a flight component to the project from its inception in 2001. By 2002, they had hooked up with a pilot named Richard Johnson who brought his AirCam to the area for them to try out.

Hain took a ride first and seemed to approve, then told Hampp to give it a try.

“I got to photograph my first right whale from the air,” she said, remembering that first flight.

On the way back, Johnson let her take the controls for a bit.

“I though, ‘Oh my gosh, this is the coolest thing I have ever done,’ ” she said.

Two months later, she was taking flight lessons. By the winter of 2003, she and Johnson were flying together, and the Right Whale Project bought its own AirCam three years later.

Nowadays, during the months that the project is active, Hampp and one of two volunteer spotters head out to survey the waters between St. Augustine inlet and Cape Canaveral.

Beginning, usually, off Matanzas Inlet, they generally fly north about a half-mile off the coast until they get to St. Augustine, then they head 1½ miles offshore and fly south to Cape Canaveral before coming back in and flying north to Matanzas a half-mile off the coast.

Paying close attention to areas where project volunteers or “opportunistic spotters” have reported seeing whales, the circuit typically takes just over three hours but can take up to four, Hampp said.

She’s enthusiastic when she talks about the work, but notes it is not for everybody.

Not only does the Right Whale Project operate with a permit from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries Office, which allows them to approach closer than the 500-yard no-approach rule for right whales, the work can be taxing.

First, it’s cold. The AirCam that Hampp flies has a completely open-air cockpit.

One of her spotters, volunteer Terry Clark, who joined Hampp on Friday, said she sometimes wears five layers, including a bright orange flotation coverall — like the ones worn by commercial fisherman – that they call a “pumpkin suit.”

And in a lightweight aircraft with no restroom, a three-hour flight can seem pretty long, they said.

But Clark, who is on her second year of flying with Hampp, remains enthusiastic and said she feels lucky that she got asked to fly as a spotter.

Asked what its like flying in an open-air cockpit over the ocean, she said, “It’s the closest thing to flying like a bird.”

Read this St. Augustine Record story.