Pilots on two Canadian bush planes will face a treacherous task when they reach Antarctica in the coming days: navigating all kinds of extreme weather in a bid to rescue an ailing researcher.
Kenn Borek Air, a Calgary airline, dispatched two Twin Otter aircrafts on Tuesday to evacuate the employee from the Amundsen-Scott station, a U.S. research hub at the South Pole — as far inland as one can go in Antarctica, making it one of the most isolated places on Earth.
The sheer length of the journey — around 16,700 km, which will take the pilots until Sunday, at least — is just one challenge. Antarctica is always cold, bone-chillingly so, but June is the rough midpoint of the southern hemisphere’s winter. Temperatures often hover around -60 C. The sky can remain dark for months at a time. Due to these conditions, flights are a rarity at this time of year.
Kenn Borek, a small passenger and cargo airline, has piloted rescue missions to Antarctica before. In 2001 and 2003, it flew into Amundsen-Scott to evacuate workers who needed to be hospitalized. But on a flight in January 2013 to deliver fuel to an Italian research team, a Kenn Borek plane crashed into an Antarctic mountain due south of New Zealand, killing all three people on board.
“It’s never an easy place to fly,” said Peter West, a spokesman for the National Science Foundation, which oversees American research in Antarctica. “But there are additional challenges for a winter flight.” Here are five of them:
Perpetual darkness
The foremost issue is Antarctica’s utter lack of sunlight. All over the continent, there is a weeks-long period in June where the sun simply doesn’t rise, a condition that extends over several months at the South Pole. When the pilots descend on Amundsen-Scott, they’ll be doing so from pitch-black skies. “Obviously,” West said, “we wouldn’t undertake this mission if, on the basis of medical experts, it wasn’t felt that it was necessary to bring this person out of the South Pole, to a place where they can get treatment that’s not available at the Pole.”
Frigid cold
The lowest recorded air temperature in human history was noted at Vostok — a Russian-run Antarctic research centre, located straight south of China — on July 21, 1983: -89.2 C. That’s an extreme measurement, but it is not radically different from what visitors to Amundsen-Scott typically confront. Monthly recordings from 1957-1988 show average daily temperatures of -58 C in June, dipping to a low of -60 C in August. And even though Kenn Borek’s Twin Otter planes are well equipped to fly in the cold, according to West, the pilots, engineer and medical attendant aboard each aircraft will be susceptible to the chill when they perform their duties after landing.
Arduous ice
The National Science Foundation has a presidential mandate “going back to the Reagan administration” to commandeer American research in Antarctica, West said. Unfortunately, the continent’s unforgiving climate dates back much further. Ninety-eight per cent of Antarctica is covered in ice, which makes landing a plane a daunting task. Because the runways at the Jack F. Paulus Skiway airport, near Amundsen-Scott, are situated on ice and snow, there are no permanent lights. Usually, Jack F. Paulus only welcomes flights during Antarctica’s brighter season, from October to February. Kenn Borek’s Twin Otters are equipped with skis and tundra tires for icy landings year-round, though, and GPS and navigation systems are in place to identify the runway.
Obviously, we wouldn’t undertake this mission if, on the basis of medical experts, it wasn’t felt that it was necessary to bring this person out of the South Pole
Long, long journey
The best-case scenario for the Kenn Borek planes is a Sunday arrival, five days after their departure. The total distance from Calgary to Amundsen-Scott — with stops in the U.S., Costa Rica, Ecuador and Chile — is nearly 16,700 km, counting a lengthy leg over most of Antarctica. “They’re flying across a continent the size of the U.S. and Mexico combined,” West said. “That’s the land area that we’re talking about.” The taxing trip is being stretched over several days to avoid exhausting the crew and planes before they even make it to the South Pole.
Unpredictable weather
Right now, the pilots don’t know what the weather will be like when they approach the research station. After leaving South America, they’ll fly straight south to Rothera, a British base on the Antarctic coast, to briefly set up camp and determine when to make an aerial pass at Amundsen-Scott. The issue is that there aren’t many stations tracking day-to-day conditions on the continent, making it impossible to forecast when the pilots will arrive — or what will await them. “Weather is a very difficult thing to keep track of,” West said. “(It’s) much more difficult than it would be, say, in Canada, for example, or the U.S.”
Source :http://news.nationalpost.com/
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