Prepping four airplanes, to fly from the top of the world to the bottom of the world (with four new crewmembers) requires patience, planning, forbearance, skill, and several other virtues that I don't possess.
And yet, seven days after our Calgary departure, we are here. Granted, we are at Rothera (the Brit Station on the peninsula), and not at our destination. It's a lot like saying we're almost in Inuvik when we depart Halifax.
Leaving was not, for all of us the pleasant exciting time it often is. Personal tragedy, mis-placed equipment, and aprehension about flying off the edge of the known world made it difficult for several of us. Flying into one country enroute where deviations from normal flight tolerances often result in arrest likely didn't make it easier for the new crews.
We have had good flight conditions the length of the flight. Tail-winds, fair weather, no thunderstorms or accumulated icing. Yesterday made up for that.
Crossing the Drake is an occaision not unlike crossing the equator for sailors. For pilots the things that we forget from flight school really are important. We reach a point of no return enroute. At this point we are commited to proceeding. There is a critical point where we will take an equal mount of time to return safely to South America or to proceed. We have a different calculation if an engine fails and we must fly home at a slower speed. New co-pilots tend to be very solemn when they calculate these points. I have a new co-pilot.
While we have forecasters building forecasts and interpreting weather sattellite imagery for us, nature is a force to be reckoned with. The winds were more a hindrance that a help. Icing limited our ability to climb. We had a window of opportunity to arrive in Rothera of about eight hours. It is a seven hour flight. I landed on the ski strip above the base. The previous two aircraft on wheels landed at the base. The ski tracks of the first aircraft to land at the ski-strip (my reference for safe touchdown ) disappeared in the half light of cloud cover (flat light) 15 minutes after touchdown.
Arriving on the continent means changing the configuration of the aircraft from wheels to wheel-skis to land at the ski-way, and then from wheel-skis to straight skis. Wheel-skis weigh 900 pounds. We take one set of these for each two aircraft. Straight skis 300. We take them all with us. Changing them means an engineer has to have the help of his pilots. Which means twice as much work for the engineers as working alone.
We worked to the end of our duty day up on the glacier changing the skiis. Tow machines now have skis. Two are on wheel-skis. The latter will fly up to the top of the glacier when the weather improves. Then we will put straight skis on them. This an all-day process. As a rule, engineer's have a much lower opinion of pilots than when they started.
Today the weather is as brutal as you might be able to picture, when you imagine Polar explorers trudging through the snow. No visability due to driving snow in a 40 knot wind. No contrast so that you trip over any small drift. Today we are staying put. Tomorrow too maybe. After a week of speaking Spanglish, we are learning to speak English English. There are 21 dialects of it. There are 21 Brits here. Each one speaks a different dialect.
But we are here!
. Didn't anyone ever tell you that you are supposed to stay in 
.
