According to the Washington Post, Kelly Falkner, the director of polar programs for the National Science Foundation (NSF), says at least one employee for contractor Lockheed-Martin requires medical treatment that is unavailable at the station and needs to be flown out.
Falkner added that another worker may need to be evacuated. She did not go into details about the medical conditions of the two workers for privacy reasons. “We try to balance our decisions with all of the risks involved,” Falkner said.
Other risks that have to be taken into consideration include the medical conditions of the two people, the safety of the flight crew, as well as the overall risks involved in flying in or out of Antarctica during what is called the austral winter, which lasts from April to September.
“It’s a very serious decision that we take to move in this direction,” she said.
Around 50 people stay through the winter at the station, most of them employed by the NSF, (which runs the station) or Lockheed-Martin. Because of the ongoing scientific work on the atmosphere and climate change, the station needs to be maintained year around. There are two radio telescopes that are used to study the early history of the universe. They also are involved is a project that focuses on the behavior of subatomic particles at the station’s IceCube Neutrino Observatory.
Evacuations during Antarctic winters
In the 60 years the station has been open, only two evacuations have ever been attempted. It is brutally cold and total darkness blankets the South Pole during winters there, making flights in or out nearly impossible. In 1999, a doctor discovered a lump in her right breast and ended up doing her own biopsy as well as administering her own chemotherapy.
It was six months before weather conditions became good enough that she could be evacuated out. Ten years later, a station manager suffered a stroke in August, and this led to a tense stand-off on whether he could be evacuated off the station.
“We were stuck in a place that’s harder to get to than the International Space Station,” said Ron Shemenski, a former physician for the station who in 2001 became the first person to be evacuated during the dark winter months. “We know we’re on our own.”
Kenn Borek Air to make the rescue
The tiny Twin Otter is the only airplane that can attempt a trip to the South Pole during the winter months. Calgary-based Kenn Borek Air, for only the third time in history, has been called upon to make the rescue mission. The only South Pole experience the airline has is the two previous successful rescues they made.
The Calgary Sun reported that two Twin Otters owned by Kenn Borek Air left Calgary on Tuesday morning for an almost 10,000 km (6,214 miles) trip that will take at least five days. The eight-seat, twin-propeller planes will be crossing North America and then South America, each carrying a pilot, co-pilot, engineer and a medic.
“The mission will be highly weather-dependent and the current best-case scenario is that a plane would arrive at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station no sooner than June 19,” reads the NSF website.
The NSF says that once the planes reach the British research station Rothera on Adelaide Island, one plane and its crew will stay behind so that in the event the plane going on to the NSF station goes down, they would be able to provide search and rescue capabilities.
The plane going on to attempt the rescue will have to make it through bitter cold and an impenetrable darkness. The current temperature at Amundsen-Scott is minus 76 degrees Fahrenheit. If all goes well, the rescue plane could land at the station as early as June 19, if the weather provides a window.
“It’s a 10-hour flight, and you only have 12 or 13 hours of fuel on board,” said Alberta bush pilot Sean Loutitt. “You’re monitoring the weather the whole time, but eventually, you get to a point of no return. Then you’re committed to the pole, no matter what.”
Loutitt was the pilot flying the plane that rescued Shemenski in 2001. Before that rescue, a flight through the polar night in winter had never been done. Loutitt was the first man to do this, even though everyone assumed it couldn’t be done. “That belief is part of the mythology of the pole, Shemenski said. “It was like a macho thing,” he recalled. “At that point when the last plane left you were there for six months. That was it.”
Loutitt will not be the pilot on this third rescue mission. He is now a senior manager at Canadian North Inc., but he says the pilots behind the controls for mission number three are top-notch.
