NEWSLETTER

FOUR MEN WHO WORK IN ANTARCTICA - PART 4

INTERVIEWS BY ROCCO CASTORO, PHOTOS BY CHRIS LINDER, WOODS HOLE OCEANOGRAPHIC INSTITUTION

Air Force personnel and Antarctica scientists pass the time on the five-hour flight from New Zealand to McMurdo Station.

Colonel Gary James, operations commander, Air National Guard—109th Airlift Wing

Vice: You’re a pilot who specializes in flying giant planes into and out of barren tundra.

Gary: I’ve been flying C-130 Hercules aircrafts for about 20 years, but around 2000 I elected to get out of active duty and joined the 109th as a technician. I was stationed up in Alaska for six years and intermittently airlifted supplies to Antarctica. The mission in Alaska was to support the army infantry division at Fort Richardson and also to support all the early-warning radar sites that were spread throughout Alaska. Most of those sites have been closed and now the pilots of the 109th are the sole operators of the ski-equipped Hercules airplanes. The reason we have these planes is to support the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic- exploration missions.

So there are no proper runways in Antarctica?

Not in the traditional sense. It’s so cold that if there were paved runways you’d have to deal with all the breakups and cracks as the permafrost beneath it melts and sinks when the temperature changes. For the first half of the season we normally operate off the sea ice. It’s a lot less expensive to maintain and as it degrades you just land on the permanent ice shelf using ski equipment.

A C-17 delivers fresh researchers and supplies to McMurdo.

What kind of cargo do you transport?

The South Pole is getting an entirely new station and every piece of equipment that’s used in its construction was designed to fit in the back of our airplanes. We’ve brought in telescopes and research gear; in fact, we’ve flown in the construction supplies for almost everything built in Antarctica in recent times. Three years ago they traversed some fuel to the South Pole, but that was first land traverse of anything since the 1900s when they were trying to set up an outpost. The Russians do something like that at Vostok Station. It’s a very old and unsanitary facility that looks like a junkyard. In the ten years that I’ve been going to Antarctica there have been two outbreaks of tuberculosis there. The reason the Russians are still there is that they’ve been trying to figure out how to tap into Lake Vostok, a freshwater lake underneath the ice, without contaminating it.

Are the Russians the laughing stock of Antarctica?

I wouldn’t say that—the Russian camps just don’t have any money. When we pull guys out of Vostok they’ve been there for at least a year and they look very gruesome. I don’t know how to put it delicately, but there’s a difference in the programs from the United States, where things are done the right way, and the Russian programs which are run on shoestring budgets with not a lot of thought about what’s going to happen ten years from now.


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