When planning my research trip with the Antarctic Artists & Writers Program, I had to make a wishlist of places to visit. One of the more important ones was the Beardmore Glacier, the route by which Scott and his men climbed from the Ross Ice Shelf (or, as they called it, the Barrier) to the Polar Plateau. It's one of the largest glaciers in the world, but is hardly visited anymore so is rarely photographed, and despite the blessing of Google Image Search, I had too poor a sense of it to draw a journey up or down it with any confidence.
Setting foot on the Beardmore turned out be prohibitively demanding, logistically, but there are regular LC-130 flights between McMurdo Station and the Pole which traverse the Beardmore en route. The plan we made was for me to get on one of those, and snap as much as I could from one of the small windows as we flew.
November 2019 turned out to be a terrible time for Pole flights – if the weather was OK at Pole, there was a problem with the planes, or vice versa. However, the weather delays worked in my favour, because they affected not only Pole flights, but one particular season-opening flight, which had been bumped so many times that it still hadn't gone when I turned up. That meant I could get a seat.
The big flights ffor the USAP’s operations in East Antarctica – cargo and passenger flights on/off continent, and to major stations like Pole and WAIS Divide – are handled by the New York Air National Guard, and their fleet of enormous military airplanes, namely a C-17 and small handful of LC-130 Hercules. There are lots of smaller trips from McMurdo to satellite stations, and these are serviced by Kenn Borek Air, a Canadian company which operates out of Calgary, Alberta. At the start of every season, they fly their fleet of Twin Otters and Baslers down the length of North and South America, then leapfrog depots down the Peninsula and thence to various hubs including McMurdo. From there they move people and stuff where they need to go, and also restock those fuel depots. There was one depot flight that remained to be done, and it happened to be to a cache near the base of the Beardmore, so they agreed to take me along.
I was not the only extra job tacked on to the flight. After depoting the fuel, we were to scout out a camp in the Transantarctic Mountains which had been in regular use until a some fierce winds a few years ago had scoured great furrows in the landing strip. Was it landable again? What state was the camp in? We would find out. They also wanted to scope out a historic site that left no physical trace, to get updated intel on its condition. Then we would fly north again via the Beardmore and the coordinates for One Ton Depot.
As soon as the Basler had finished her more pressing engagements, we were put on alert for the depot run. Everything in Antarctica is weather-dependent, and that can change on a dime, so one is always on standby. Because they needed to make the most of the Basler's time, they would put two missions on for any given day, then the one with the best prospects would be activated. For five days I was ready to go – breakfasted, fully suited up, lunch packed, ECW bag to hand – at 7 a.m., in case my flight was the one that was going. Flight status would be announced on the screens at the entrance to the Galley.
For four mornings I joined the poor Thwaites Glacier team anxiously hanging on the screens – they were trying to get out to WAIS Divide (the high point of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, from which they would catch a flight to the Thwaites camp) where the weather had been abominable for a month. One of those mornings my flight was activated and I got all the way out to the airfield only for it to be called off at the last minute because of a change in forecast for the depot site. But finally, the fifth morning, it was all systems go!
There are two airfields that serve McMurdo: Phoenix, which is designed to take the massive C-17s on a packed snow runway where they can land with wheels, and Williams Field, of groomed snow, for ski'd aircraft. The extra special thing about Williams Field is that it's more or less where Scott's 'Safety Camp' was located – so named because it was far enough onto the ice shelf not to break up and float out to sea – so the view to Ross Island from there would have been very familiar to our explorers. On the day of my false start, while waiting to find out that the plane wasn't going after all, I got to take some good pictures of the view from there. It was also a good day to get a sense of the 'bad light' that obliterated contrast on the snow and made navigation difficult:
The Sea Ice Incident took place between us and the conical hill to the left! Wild!
Anyway, Try no. 5 was on a much nicer day. Here is the magnificent bird with her spanking new paint job:
The cargo was me and those five oil drums.
It wasn’t such a bad seat, though – I got to watch the flight deck all day!
It was a funny experience – I mean, besides sharing the fuselage with many hundreds of gallons of flammable liquid – in that it was an island of Canada amidst all the Americans. The crew all lived in BC when they weren't in Antarctica, and next to my seat were the usual set of flight safety brochures, in English and French, just as if we were flying out of Calgary.
Our pilot was named Steve, and I learned from him that, if you're training to be a pilot in Canada, you have to do your qualifying hours in the North. Most people put in their time and then get a comfortable job flying passengers between major southern cities, but Steve liked the North so much he stayed and stayed, until he got the job with Kenn Borek and ended up South. As much as I feel obliged to make a facetious quip about my flammable fellow passengers, I can honestly say I have never felt safer in an airplane than this one. This was just as well, as one of the first things we did once we were in the air was rather exciting.
The Basler is a workhorse, and one of the Antarctic planes (though I never found out if it was this one) had actually flown in WWII – they just keep going and going. However, the hydraulics that lift the landing gear were designed to lift just the landing gear, not the landing gear plus 650-pound skis, so in order to get them up we had to lose some weight. And we did this by climbing steeply up and then nose-diving, bringing us temporarily closer to zero G. We had to do this every time we took off, and it took 2-3 goes to get the skis up successfully. You'd expect someone with a history of nervous flying and a sensitivity to motion sickness to find this unpleasant, but it was just plain awesome.
This post is getting long already, so I will describe our errands in detail over the next two posts. I really must take the time here, though, to give my regards to Kenn Borek Air. I don't think anyone in Canada knows how absolutely vital they are to everything that gets done in Antarctica; their vermillion planes keep camps supplied and people moving around, and are the everyday lifeblood of the continent, in the most literal circulatory sense. Steve and the Basler may possibly have saved the Thwaites Glacier project this season – after a month of delays getting people and freight out to the field camps, it was reaching a point where they might have called off the massive international project for this year. But they allocated the Basler to the WAIS flights and Steve landed it in conditions that the NYANG wouldn't – the Basler couldn't fly nearly as much cargo as a Herc, but they got enough out there that some work could begin. I haven't seen this mentioned in any of the Thwaites coverage and I'm sure it hasn't been covered in Canada, but for a country that doesn't even have a national Antarctic program, they should be mighty proud of the central role their people play in making other countries' programs happen.