How do you stick your hand out of a plane safely? We’re about to find out. 

The day is finally here, we’re at a small local airport in October 2021. It's myself, my colleague Jaide, who is a metabolic engineer, and my neighbors Kenn and Erika. Kenn is a certified pilot and Erika was in the process of getting her pilots license. We packed plenty of petri dishes as well with the goal of collecting life up there. If anything grew in the petri dishes back in our lab, we had a chance of seeing (or rather smelling), what scents life up there made.

The plane we used is a single propeller plane that goes about 150 miles per hour cruising speed. There was concern about the ability to stick the hand out of the window safely with a petri dish. We made two decisions: 1) to use attachments like these to secure the petri dishes to minimize how much our actual arms are going out the window. And 2) to slow down the plane’s engine as much as possible when we are at altitude to slow it down to make this safer. 

We waited a bit for cloud cover and up we went. When we got up to altitude, we slowed the engine just like we planned, opened the window, and began. One by one we stuck each of the petri dishes out the window. The collection took two minutes, and the whole flight took 20, though it felt like forever. I was terrified the whole time! 

And can you imagine after all that, the worst thing we thought could happen was that nothing would grow and it was all for nothing, but there was something worse that could happen, we would end up being told to destroy what we had collected.

That's in Part 3. Read more here. 

- Jasmina, Founder