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It’s not standard practice for students at La Pietra-Hawaii School for Girls to take calls from their parents in the middle of class, but when Walter Klein buzzed his daughter Isabella’s class in November, it was a call worth taking.
Klein, a mission director for NASA, was in Punta Arenas, Chile, the last stop before he and the rest of the team from Operation IceBridge headed to the Antarctic Peninsula.
"What’s great is we can talk about what we do," he said. "None of this stuff is secret — and it’s timely. Kids are really, really aware of climate change, and we’re actually flying over the ice caps and glaciers at the time of year when the southern oceans are at their farthest reaches and the ice is at its largest extent, and we’re looking at it with LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) and radar to study their properties and characteristics.
"It’s the real deal," he said. "So when we talk to them, we can say, "This is what we’re seeing now.’"
And thus a classroom of inquisitive Hawaii students was able to advance their studies in climate change via a real-time exchange with someone on duty with the largest airborne survey of Earth’s polar ice caps.
Klein said such interaction is perhaps his favorite part of a job that over the years has seen him conduct onboard symphonies of flight operation and scientific inquiry while jetting into the eyes of hurricanes to measure turbulence ("always disconcerting") or flying low and slow over polar regions to record the fine contours of a changing "icescape."
It’s all heady stuff for a guy from Long Island, N.Y., who stepped sideways from a family lineage of cops and firefighters to become a naval flight officer.
Klein earned a bachelor’s degree in geology from Hamilton College before attending Aviation Officer Candidate School in Pensacola, Fla., where he met his future wife, Lillian.
It was on their honeymoon flight to Hawaii that Klein determined their future home.
"The first time I saw (Hawaii) from an airplane, I said, ‘This is where I want to settle,’" Klein said.
Klein eventually realized his dream as he rose through the ranks to become a Navy commander and strike liaison officer at Joint Intelligence Center Pacific. Klein joined NASA in 2000.
These days, Klein’s commute to work is the converse of what most in Hawaii experience: The traffic is fine but the distance is a killer. Every two weeks, Klein flies from Honolulu to the Armstrong Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif.
"It works out," Klein says. "I still get to be around to help out and do the normal dad things."
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