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A Risky Winter Rescue Is Going Down At the South Pole. Here’s How

One of the 48 people holed up for the winter at the South Pole’s Amundsen-Scott research station has fallen ill, and a Canadian aircrew has been dispatched to retrieve the patient from the perpetually dark deep freeze of Antarctica’s winter. 

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This is no normal rescue. There are no regular flights into the South Pole between February and October — and a winter evacuation has been ordered only twice before. The National Science Foundation (NSF), which manages U.S. Antarctic research programs, won’t identify the patient or the illness, but, says NSF spokesman Peter West, “I think you can extrapolate from the fact that we're doing a flight at this time of year, and the fact that we’ve waived the considerations of the health of the patient and the safety of the crews, that it is a serious situation."

While the sun hasn’t crept above the horizon since March, winter in the Southern Hemisphere officially started Monday. Temperatures at the pole typically run around -75 degrees this time of year — cold enough to freeze fuel and turn the hydraulic fluid used to operate an aircraft’s landing gear to jelly.

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Landing at the South Pole involves touching down on a runway of groomed snow atop the continent’s two-mile-thick ice sheet, with the flight crew straining to pick out the runway in whiteout conditions, says New York Air National Guard Lt. Col. Dave Panzera. “You don’t want to be making mistakes,” he says. “There’s a lot of things that can be gotchas down there, from the terrain to the weather to the ice itself.”

The planes en route to the station are two De Havilland Twin Otters, high-latitude workhorses capable of landing on short, snowy runways with skis. They’re flown by the Canadian airlift company Kenn Borek, and can operate in temperatures as low as -100 degrees.

The plan is to stop first at the British research station at Rothera, about 600 miles from South America. When weather permits, one plane will make the 1,500-mile flight to the pole; the other will stay in Rothera as a search-and-rescue craft, West said.

Panzera flies much larger LC-130H transports for the Guard’s 109th Airlift Wing, which supplies Antarctic research stations in the summer. It was the 109th that retrieved Dr. Jerri Nielsen from the polar station in October 1999, after a winter in which she had to treat herself for breast cancer before being evacuated.

“The South Pole can become somewhat of a milk run, but I never take it for granted,” he says. “You’ll have that moment on a go-around or on a landing that will remind you, ‘Hey, there’s nothing routine about this.’ ”

Kenn Borek, which has flown in the Antarctic since the late 1980s, lost a Twin Otter and its three-man crew in January 2013, when it crashed into the side of a mountain near the coast.

“These are some intrepid men and women who fly those aircraft,” he said. “They do an amazing job. It’s just a very unforgiving place.” 

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