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Aviation History
1985
1985 - 0098.PDF
Antarctic shuttle The US Navy's VXE6 is the only squadron totally dedicated to aerial support of exploration and research on the frozen continent which covers an area bigger than the United States and Mexico combined. The squadron flies six rocket- boosted ski-Hercules all over "The Ice", and six twin-engined Hueys up into volcanic mountains—some of them more than 15,000ft above sea level. Peter Middleton reports. The ski-Hercules is a ground-loving beast. Getting one airborne at only the sixth attempt is not unusual. Sometimes it takes all the strength of two pilots to pull it off the snow. Sometimes zero flap works best; sometimes applying half flap and rotating at 60kt will do the trick, getting the nose up and allowing the Hercules to accelerate to 90kt, when it will stagger into the air. Occasionally it requires anything mov able (including passengers) to be piled on the rear loading ramp to break the suction between Antarctica and the Teflon-coated nose ski. The pilots then face the minor inconvenience of keeping the tail-heavy, unstable aircraft only half airborne until the passengers can run down to the front again, carrying the loose freight. All this activity can take up miles of territory. But Antarctica is a big place. As a last-ditch effort, when the nose ski bogs down at 40kt and the Hercules will not go any faster, Jato bottles are bolted behind the main undercarriage fairings. They no longer use the original jetti- sonable bottles because the drag saving is hardly significant when you already have three skis (two of them 20ft long) dangling beneath the aircraft. Anyway, the jettisonable bottles had a discon certing tendency to rip loose and take a wing off. Ever since the expeditions led by Capt Byrd in the 1920s and 1930s, it has fallen to the US Navy to provide logistic support for US teams working on the Antarctic scientific research programme known as "Operation Deep Freeze". The conse quence of this historical precedent is that The ski-Hercules, top, has long been the main stay of logistics support for US scientific research in Antarctica. Owned by the US National Science Foundation, and flown by US Nauy crews, they provide transport into the Antarctic interior for New Zealand scientific parties, right, as well as for US researchers the ski-Hercules based at McMurdo are flown by US Navy crews, although they are owned by the US National Science Foundation. Antarctic Development Squadron Six (to give it its full name) claims the title of the world's* most southerly airline, and boasts that it has never lost a passenger (or had a serious incident involving passengers) despite the appalling condi tions in which it is sometimes forced to fly- The squadron's Bell UH-1N helicopters are currently busy ferrying New Zealand seismological researchers on to the slopes of Mt Erebus, which is heaving massive rocks skyward in a display of volcanic activity unparalleled in decades. The day- to-day co-operation between both the scientific and airborne logistics teams from the United States and New Zealand is impressive. The US ice airfield is separated from the New Zealanders' Scott Base on Ross Island by only a few miles of frozen sea. Some of the Ross Sea is permanent ice shelf all year round, but some of it melts in summer. The permanent section has channels cut into it by some of the stron gest sustained winds on Earth, as well as • ^jRi». • .-^^ ' * •i \ JLI . '... VX 26 FLIGHT International, 12 January 1985
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