All Signs Point North

As kids we all have these crazy ideas of what we want to be when we grow up. When I was a little girl I wanted to be some combination of an aerospace engineer and Indiana Jones. This week I’ve flown on a refurbished DC-3 through the Trans Antarctic Mountains on one day and to the South Pole the next. It’s an amazing feeling to realize you’ve achieved your childhood dream job (or at least as close to it as it exists in the real world).

What a week. We’ve started our science flights on Wednesday, and I have eased into a daily routine of waking up at 5 am so I can get ready, eat breakfast, take a 6 mile 40 minute shuttle ride to the airfield, prepare the radar (and myself) for an 8:30 am takeoff. Most flights are planned to be about 5.5 hours, but our aircrew is pretty savvy about route planning, so we usually tack on a few additional flight lines which extend our flights by an hour or so. By the time we get back to McMurdo, it’s about time for dinner. There’s usually something going on each evening (often including more work), and with the constant daylight I find myself going to bed way later than I should.

As I mentioned, we started our science flights on Wednesday, but Thursday and Friday were by far the most exciting days this week. Thursday’s flights included flying through the Transantarctic Mountains. We were quite literally flying less than 1000’ above mountain tops, and were often flying through valleys where the sides of cliffs were only a few thousand feet from our wingtip (though they looked like they were only a few feet!). They don’t do the sights justice, below are a few pics of my view from the plane on Wednesday. The other day I had someone ask me why I would want to come back to Antarctica. I can’t remember what I said at the time, but after Wednesday I recognized that my answer is that the world is filled with power and beauty, and it should be observed and experienced.

While Wednesday’s flights were scenic, the ante was upped on Thursday. Originally our team was supposed to spend a week at the South Pole station to complete our two required flights; however, it wasn’t until I got down here that I was told only the bare minimum of people were going to go down, and I wasn’t part of that bare minimum team. My hopes of seeing the pole were dashed.

The pilots started expressing concerns about leaving the plane down at the pole for a week, and suggested instead to do two day trips down there, refueling at the pole and flying back. It meant being on the plane for 16 hours, but it also meant potentially more people could go down since we wouldn’t be staying at the station. I got excited again, but the day before our flight down there, I was told the captain only wanted to bring a minimum number of people. Since this meant only our radar team lead would be flying, my hopes were once again extinguished.

Early in this deployment, I offered to learn how to operate our precision navigation software. I had gotten it mostly set up before the pole flight, and ten minutes before the plane was supposed to takeoff I realized I hadn’t actually programmed the day’s flight paths since I wasn’t flying. I went and told our science lead, and he responded with, “Well we should have a dedicated person operating that during flight, let me go talk to the pilots and see if they are ok adding you so you can operate the PercisionNav.” He came back with a thumbs up from the pilots. With the flight scheduled to takeoff in a few minutes, I sprinted the quarter mile to the bathroom since there isn’t one the plane—only pee bottles which is exactly what they sound like (luckily there was a truck waiting for someone else when I got out of the bathroom, so they gave me a ride back). When I got back, I quickly scrambled to grab my ECW gear and some extra food for the long day ahead.

It was about 6.5 hours to get to the pole since we were flying science routes to get there, but I made it! It was -25^oF when we landed, though it wasn’t as cold as I had expected (I could, however, feel my nose hairs freezing after about 20 minutes of being outside). Below are the pics from the pole.

It been a long week, and I’ve flown almost 30 hours in about 4 days. Today (Sunday) is our one day off, and we are planning on doing some hiking and exploring today. We’ve been pretty lucky with weather so far, and I hope it can continue next week so we can complete more flights.