Flight to McMurdo

Some of the posts may be out of order because I never got around to them. This is from my flight from New Zealand to McMurdo.

The C-17 in Christchurch. Apparently our flight was delayed because they needed to replace a battery. I figure it was for the avionics.















The C-17 has a redundant control system. Like a lot of modern planes, it's flown by fly-by-wire, but it also has a mechanical system to back up the electronic system. In this photo you can see some barely see a white pulley in the top of the photo. The crew never needed to use the system during the flight, but apparently it's interesting to watch them go through the pre-flight checks.















This shot is looking towards the rear of the plane.















It's sort of hard to tell with this shot, but there are faint white lines on the pieces of broken up sea ice. Those may be penguin tracks, I tried zooming in quite a bit, so I'm not sure. I think it's more likely those are just cracks that have yet to open up, but I'll pretend.




























Here's a picture of an ice tongue from some glacier. You can see the glacier flowing out of the mountains and at some point it hits the ocean and makes a cantilevered shelf sticking out which is known as an ice tongue. Around the ice tongue is sea ice, which forms in the winter and may break apart in the summer and is usually 8 feet thick or so I think.














Here's a photo of what will be an iceberg. When pieces of the ice tongue break off they gradually migrate out to sea. It can take years for them to make the way through all the sea ice. My guess is this is at least 50 feet above the water which means that there may be 350 feet or so below the water.














The cargo getting loaded onto a sleigh. One of the interesting things about landing in a cargo plane is you don't know when you are going to touchdown. The C-17 crew announced the landing by giving us a 2 second warning over the PA system.















Here you can see cardboard boxes containing frozen food that the C-17 was going to airdrop at the South Pole. They make one airdrop over the summer to practice for winter air drops. The air crew was flying from Christchurch to McMurdo to the South Pole and then back to Christchurch making for a 24 hour work day.