Matt, Corey a CSBF employee, and myself left McMurdo on the 28th around 9 in the morning in a Twin Otter. Kenn Borek, the company that is contracted to fly there Twin Otters and Basler airplanes sent along a mechanic, as they do whenever an aircraft is left in the deep field overnight. The mechanic was quite eager to leave Antarctica, so he was a very useful worker for us. We arrived at Siple Dome a little after noon to refuel, drop off some gear, pick up some gear and the camp manager from Siple Dome. The flight to the crash site took about 45 minutes.
This is looking out of the window approaching the crash site.
First view of the gondola. The balloon was nowhere to be seen. I've heard it lands up to 40 miles away.
You can see an indentation where the gondola likely impacted the snow.
All the drop downs were destroyed.
One of the items we took along was an 8 foot long crevasse probe. Crevasses form when snow bridges over a crack in the ice. When you're on the ground they are hard to spot. It's essentially a 3/4 inch diameter steel rod with a handle in the end that you stick in the ground to probe the snow. You can detect a crevasse based upon the level of resistance. Normally you have to ram the probe into the snow, and it doesn't go in more than a few feet at most. The snow at our site was so soft that if you dropped the probe from about 3 feet off the ground, it would bury it's entire length in the snow. This made the probe useless, and also made walking around quite a task, esepcially when carrying heavy gondola pieces.
Part way through the first day. We sent the Twin Otter back to Siple Dome to offload some recovered items.
The weather was perfect most of the time we were there.
As we left it around 7:30 in the evening. We left some other gear behind so that we could take more gondola pieces back to Siple Dome with us. The light was so flat, the pilots couldn't see the ground, and so they buzzed us as a heigh reference and landed quite a ways away and taxi'ed back.
On the second day, the pilots took the CSBF employee up the parachute(the lumpy snow in the distance) which was about 1000 feet away to retrieve some of the termination devices as well balloon samples. The parachute was buried in a couple feet of snow and although "nothing is left behind" I don't believe I remember seeing the parachute on the plane.
We came back to the site around 9 am the next morning, and had finished breaking down the gondola by 11:30 that morning. We had sent the Twin Otter back to offload more gear, so we ended up waiting around for it to return. As you can see not much was left behind, but a number of nuts, bolts, pins, clips, twine etc and a few tools were lost in the snow.
3 comments:
Brian - Great photos of the recovery! I'm glad you got it all - especially the hula girl! I'm sure she will have a place of honor in someone's office. Happy travels home. I hope you have time to take in some sights in New Zealand on the way up.
Thanks Mike and thanks for your input on viewing the moon, I hadn't really thought about it and now I understand why I never saw more than half of the moon. I wish I could spend some time in New Zealand on the return, but unfortunately I have missed about 4 weeks of classes already and need to get back to take a midterm. As luck would have it, I've actually spent over two months there during various trips with my family which has been spectacular, but because of it, I know what I'm missing.
It looks like the ULDB is making a phenomenal run, I hope that doesn't mean your adventures are coming to an end though.
Brian, thanks for the great pictures from recovery. And thanks for all your hard work during the entire balloon campaign. You sacrificed much time away from home to make the flight a success. Maybe we'll meet up again someday.
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