Sunday 9 January 2005
Flight to Berkner Island
I'm back at work today after a fantastic day yesterday. In the morning I was just checking my emails and getting ready to go to work when I got asked if I wanted to go on a co-pilot flight to Berkner Island. I may have mentioned that BAS always sends at least two people on every flight in case something happens to the pilot so winterers usually get a chance to go somewhere during the summer.
Berkner Island is the big island embedded in the ice to the west of Halley, and the site of an ice core drilling project for the last 3 years. They've almost finished now so they've started shipping out the samples via Halley. After rushing around making sandwiches and getting some treats together for the people there we were up in the air less than an hour after I'd been asked to go!
Normally on these flights you fly high and straight to your destination to conserve fuel but the pilot Mark was new this year so he was keen to see a bit more of the place. Since we were refueling at Blue Fields on the way we flew low over the coastline for the first hour. It was fantastic! If there was something interesting to see we would fly across to it. There were plenty of seals and a few penguins around and when we past them Mark would tip the plane to one side so I could take photos out the window. The weather was perfect so the views were amazing. We landed at Blue Fields (one of the BAS fuel depots), refuelled then took off again for Berkner. Soon after take-off we flew low over the Argentinian base Belgrano, which happened to be on the way. They have an 11 month winter with no visitors the rest of the time so there was a lot of interested people waving to us as we flew past.
After that we climbed to 9000 feet to conserve fuel and Mark let me fly the plane for a while. He was a flight instructor before working for BAS so he was happy with someone else at the controls. He showed me how to follow a heading, change altitude and make turns. He even showed me how to set up the plane for landings in case he fell unconcious for some reason and got me to do a practice one (just dropping from 9000 to 8000 feet)!
Once we reached Berkner he did the real landing then I got a tour of the ice core drilling pit while the plane was getting loaded up. There were a couple of people who I knew from Cambridge working out there so I caught up with them over a cup of tea before we took off again. I flew the first half on the way back, then Mark took over for more low level flying along the coastline. The sea was so calm that it was starting to refreeze again and at one point we thought we might have seen a whale, but by the time we got there it had dived and it didn't resurface. Still, it was a superb trip - I was so lucky to get to see so much in one day. It's probably not the end of my flights either as I'm going to be going to service some of the remote science loggers later in the season too.
Posted by simon at 2:48 PM