from that south pole blog Surprise! I’m posting on the blog, which means I’m still here at South Pole. The weather was fine, and the pilots and us were ready, but it turns out that the plane was not. They’re having mechanical problems with one of the engines. They’ve tried a number of fixes, but none of them seem to help. This might mean we have to wait for a replacement part to be shipped from McMurdo, which means we’re waiting for the next Herc flight. So we’re not flying today and we won’t be flying tomorrow. It’s a good thing we didn’t unplug the cryostat. We didn’t really end up doing anything today. We spent most of our time sitting in the galley, so that when the pilots came back inside they could find us and tell us about the state of the plane. A lot of people came up to us in the galley and asked why we’re still here. And I don’t think we’ll have much to do tomorrow, since we spent last night getting our stuff finished and ready to take with us. So, it looks like we’ll be spending a bit longer here at Pole. We’re not that surprised, delays are almost the expected outcome here. At least they found this problem while we’re here, rather than at Ridge A. The pilots say it seems to get worse with altitude, so it’s possible that we could have landed at Ridge A then been unable to take off. That would have been a bit of a disaster. We’d have needed to get another Twin Otter from somewhere else on the continent to come rescue us.
Posted on: Sat, 03 Jan 2015 14:06:49 +0000
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