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By
Steve Martaindale
Sun staff
It is not a question of whether there will be another
emergency necessitating a winter airdrop at the South
Pole. The questions are when will there be such an emergency
and whether the responding agencies will be prepared to
answer the call.
An affirmative answer to the readiness question was underlined
recently when a new aircraft proved it could handle the
task.
More than half of the occupants at Amundsen-Scott South
Pole Station turned out on the evening of Dec. 20 in temperatures
of about minus 25 degrees Fahrenheit to witness the trial
airdrop.
Around 9:45 p.m., one group of about 80 people who had
gathered in an area overlooking the drop zone watched
as a C-17 Globemaster III airplane flew from left to right.
After making its initial pass, it banked left and returned
in the direction from which it came, continuing until
it faded from sight.
The crowd continued waiting.
In a matter of minutes, the four-engine aircraft again
appeared. This second approach seemed lower and slower.
Before reaching the drop zone, the first parachute was
seen snaking out of the rear ramp, soon pulling the first
pallet from the belly of the plane. In short order, three
more pallets followed, each making a controlled, if not
graceful, descent to the South Pole’s snowy surface.
As the first pallet landed, a cheer arose from observers.
“Principally, what we were looking to do is a proof
of concept,” said David Bresnahan, “... so if
we have an emergency – not if, when we have an emergency
– in the wintertime, we’ve already worked out
all of those procedures to assure that we could safely
do that.”
Bresnahan, who is systems manager of operations and logistics
with the Office of Polar Programs of the National Science
Foundation (NSF), said the operation resulted in 100 percent
recovery of the cargo with no damage to anything.
The cargo consisted of 68,000 pounds of dry food distributed
over four pallets. The total weight of the pallets, packaging,
chutes and rigging approached 90,000 pounds.
Airdrops at the South Pole – even winter drops –
are nothing new, but the C-17 is a considerably different
airplane and both the U.S. Air Force and Boeing, its manufacturer,
were interested in proving it could be done.
“Before, all airdrops in the C-141, LC-130 and older
aircraft at the Pole were computed by the navigator,”
said Lt. Col. Greg Pyke, a Reserve C-17 pilot who helped
plan the airdrop.
“The C-17 has done away with the navigator and flight
engineer and replaced them with computers,” he said
in a released statement. “These are far more accurate
and, in normal conditions, somewhat reliable.”
Acknowledging that the South Pole is not a normal place,
plans were drawn up to test the concept.
“The pilots have run the profile in the simulator
with mixed results, and Boeing thinks it should work just
fine,” Pyke said prior to the drop. Boeing also installed
a special data collection computer to supply data for
any future software upgrades for polar operation.
Capt. Jennie Steldt, the aircraft commander, outlined
some of the challenges in a press release.
“Navigation is more complex down there,” she
said. “Instruments in the plane work differently
due to flying that close to the magnetic South Pole.”
The elevation of the South Pole, 9,300 feet, is another
challenge.
“We will have to drop 1,000 feet above that so the
parachutes attached to the load have time to inflate,”
she said. “That means we’ll be dropping above
10,000 feet in temperatures approximately negative 30
degrees Celsius.”
Lt. Col. James McGann, deputy commander of the 62nd Operations
Group, said by e-mail that the aircraft did slow down
for the drop.
“We do slow considerably,” he said. “For
this drop we were flying at 150 knots, down from 230 knots
during the ‘racetrack’ and approach.”
Airdrop’s role
While Bresnahan said the C-17 could deliver a payload
to McMurdo almost three times as great as the C-141, he
stressed that the only projected use at this time for
the aircraft at the Pole was for an emergency drop.
“It’s a fairly expensive operation,” he
said, “and you also wind up with a significant labor
problem at South Pole because you have to recover all
the dropped material and chutes. ... It’s expensive,
a lot of flight hours involved, so I don’t think
that’s a viable way to routinely deliver cargo to
Pole, but we keep looking at options.”
The idea, he said, is to know what options the U.S. Antarctic
Program has at its disposal.
“We continue to look at, is there a different way
to re-supply the South Pole besides the traditional way
we do it through McMurdo with the LC-130s?” Bresnahan
said. “We’ve still got some other options we’re
exploring, including the traverse that we’ll utilize
to deliver materials to Pole that will relieve some of
the burden from the LC-130s so that we can support more
remote field activities.”
He said a traverse – an overland delivery of fuel
and materials by a tractor caravan – is slated for
next austral summer.
This flight’s cargo was loaded in Christchurch, New
Zealand, and the C-17 stopped at McMurdo to take on more
fuel. It returned straight to Christchurch after making
the drop. In a winter emergency, he said, the Pegasus
White Ice Runway can be opened for a landing at McMurdo,
but the C-17 is capable of making a Christchurch-South
Pole round trip if it is carrying a lighter load, as would
likely be the case if it was an emergency airdrop.
“The other option we have is we can air-to-air refuel
the airplane,” Bresnahan said, “which we did
with C-141 airdrops, where a tanker would come down, and
they would do an air-to-air refueling. We could do the
same thing with a C-17.”
That means moving a lot of equipment around. The C-17s
come out of McChord Air Force Base in Washington state.
The tanker would likely come from Hickam Air Force Base
in Hawaii, he said.
“But if it’s an emergency, it’s nice that
we know we have that capability to go to our military
partners in the program,” he said. “Nobody else
has that capability to do that. You don’t go buy
that capability from a commercial airline operator, for
sure.”
A midwinter airdrop at South Pole was a regular feature
from 1981-1995. Bresnahan said the Air Force considered
it a training operation and helped cover the expenses
but assigned all costs to the NSF once it felt its crews
were proficient with the procedure. By that time, the
Antarctic stations were receiving Internet service and
were using greenhouses to help provide fresh vegetables.
The decision was made to halt the drops.
The need to maintain the capability was demonstrated during
the 1999 winter after South Pole physician Jerri Nielsen
discovered a lump in her breast. A July airdrop delivered
supplies needed for a diagnosis and to start treatment.
She was evacuated on Oct. 16 with the earliest landing
ever made at Pole.
“Now we’re prepared to do that, if necessary,
with the C-17 aircraft,” Bresnahan said of the airdrop.
In addition to a heavy cargo load, the Dec. 20 flight
carried an extra large crew. While only five members of
the crew actually dropped the supplies, another nine were
aboard to become familiarized with flying conditions at
the Pole, according to an Air Force Command News Service
release.
“They’re professionals,” Bresnahan said
of working with the Antarctic program’s military
partners. “This wasn’t a cowboy operation. They
did it by the numbers, very carefully.”
Also playing a key role in the project were the New Zealand
Defense Forces, which assisted with rigging the load in
Christchurch and sent members to the South Pole to share
their experience with handling the chutes and riggings
with workers at the Pole.
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Antarctic Sun -
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