Burton Island (AGB 1) - Naval Cruise Book

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s can an - an isolated place they can be seen more easily by search aircraft. Half a dozen toy airplanes with miniature motors are tied up out of the Way, someone asks if they are technical gadgets for the USARPS at the Pole. HThose are for the crew to play With, says Lt Leroy Frontz, the co-pilot. A short, steep ladder leads to the flight deck - too small for a fistfight yet holding the plane commander, co-pilot, navigator, flight engineer, and perhaps a visiting congressman, as well as two folding bunks, a chart table, a small galley, and a mass of instruments including TACAN, radar, radio, and a periscopic sextant. Ltjg lim Lacey, the navigator, prefers to shoot the sun, since compasses are unreliable so close to the Pole. At left, top: Cape Crozier is the nearest place where the height of the Ross Ice Shelf can be appreciated. lt runs tor perhaps 400 miles, about 100 feetot it showing above the water. The cracks are in the sea ice. Bottom: A Weddell seal weighing more than 1,000 pounds. Dr. Carleton Ray of the New York Zoological Society says that the Weddell seal is particularly valuable to the biologists because it is the only one that makes its home close to shore, under the very nose of the BioLab at McMurdog furthermore, llany wild animal as tractable as the Weddell seal is a wonder of life on this Earth and worthy of our consideration and intent. I Below: The tlight deck of a Herc.

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Below: The loadmaster aboard one of the Air Force C-130s that fly in November between Christchurch and McMurdo, under contract to the Navy. His b0OfS GFS Of a special thermal construction, S0mefimeS culled moon boots. Right: The cargo aboard a Herc is color-coded to avoid pqperworky the colors painted on the corners of the crates indicate what station in the interior ofthe Continent they are destined for, thus cutting down on the number of personnel who have to keep track of them in offices. A soft spot for a snooze can always be found on top of a sea bag, and a man can stretch his legs or walk aft for a coffee. An artist was fascinated by the patterns in the jumble of obiectsg he was reminded of the shelter drawings of Henry Moore in World War ll. Lcdr Dick Brabec taxis east. The cargo hold of a Herc looks like the inside of a barn. There are rollers, hooks, straps sides amidships padded with survival gear, an aluminum ladde and special attachments for 74 litters. Several of these are in place, high up, as bunks for the crew. Most of the space is OC- cupied by the fuel drums, but forward there is a row of seats on each side, facing inward, made of canvas and tubing, with a backrest of webbing. The plane turns and starts down the skiway. There is not much of a wait for a signal from the tower, because there is no traffic. Dallas Herring and Chuck Hylland, members of the crew check the seat belts stonily, violating the airline stewardess' rule of the Perpetual Smile. There seems to be infinite room to take off, but beyond the 13,000-foot skiway are seal holes, cracks, drifts, an occasional scientist's hut, and at the end of the shelf a ten-foot drop onto the sea ice. 'le , the ra To a passenger, the sense of danger is not as great here as it is in the United States, since the Navy maintains its own aircraft, and its people are Hhighly motivated to stay alive. The Deep Freeze Navy pilots, like the skipper of a ship, have a Hharborn always in the back of their minds. In what Admiral Dufek called uthe worst flying weather in the worldf' they usually find a place to set the plane down without hurting anybody. When Byrd spent a winter alone on the Ross Ice Shelf, he wrote: uThe tolerable quality of a dangerous existence is the fact that the human mind cannot remain continuously sensitive to any- thing. Repetition's dulling impact sees to that. On another of Shackleton's expeditions, his men endured 522 days of unbeliev- able conditions between South Georgia and Elephant Island, yet uthey had adjusted with surprisingly little trouble to their new life, and most of them were quite sincerely happy. The adaptability of the human creature is such that they actually had to remind them- selves on occasion of their desperate circumstances. Thirty seconds after the start of its run, 319 is in the air. Lacey looks at his watch. It is 9 A.M., the precise moment filed in the flight plan. The butterfly wings of White and Black Islands are seen on either side, then Minna Bluff appears. Here Scott perished in 1912. He ran into bad weather, even on the Ice Shelf, and the leather washers on the stoppers of his oil tins became worthless in the cold. At each depot he found that much of the fuel - on which he depended for melting snow to make drinking water - had evaporated. At the end, he and his two remaining companions were held in their tent for ten days by a blizzard, a single dayis march from the next depot. jerry Fichera, the flight engineer, comes aft. Lying on his stomach, he inspects the hydraulic worm of the landing gear through small glass ports in either side of the fuselage. He is responsible for all the machinery in this aircraft which has been perfected by the cumulative knowledge of fifty years. To star- board are the scintillating mountains of the Trans-Antarctic Range, a chain that goes across half the Continent and may have been linked with the Andes, according to one theory of continental drift- 38 , ,,,,,,,