Any takeoff you can walk away from...

I’m pretty sure the adage is “any landing you can walk away from is a good one” but sometimes it doesn’t work that way. Most pilots will tell you that landing is harder than taking off. I flew in Twin Otters for many years with a pilot who had a different take on this. He maintained that landings are easy; you are flying and you don’t want to be flying. Takeoffs on the other hand; you are not flying and you want to be. That’s not so easy. That has been my experience as well, at least with one aircraft. 

Fully one third of my takeoffs in a Basler have ended badly. A Basler (officially a BT-67) is a converted DC-3 or the military version, the C-47 with a large cargo/jump door. The conversion included turbo-props and new avionics. The Baslers we use in the Antarctic are fitted with skis as can be seen in the photo above. They are usually attached. Enough people have asked me the story that I thought it was time to write it down.

We finished installation of a seismic/GPS Polenet station at Mt. Patterson, 350 miles north of Siple Dome Camp (SDM), and about 1:30 in the morning were ready to head back to SDM. It had been a long day and the six science team members had missed dinner because of the late launch from SDM. The takeoff went badly; we got in the air but the left wingtip dropped and caught the snow. The landing gear tore off and we hit hard enough that the seats all tore loose. We plowed a lot of snow and came to rest in about 100 yards. All 10 of us walked away from the takeoff. Fortunately, the weather was good. It was about 20 hours before a pair of Twin Otters arrived to bring us back to McMurdo. Meanwhile though, much to our dismay, not only was there no coffee but there was no food in the “survival” bags. We had fishing line and hooks, plenty of stuff to enable us to start a fire, even wire to make snares. Everything you would need to survive in the Arctic, just no food (or coffee). The aircraft was been repaired that season and returned to service, and here is a picture of the same plane this season at WAIS Divde.

Radio Handles

Everyone should have a good radio handle. I don’t. This season at WAIS Divide we had Lancewa (pronounced with a faux-French accent), Nightingale (our Nurse Practitioner), Papa Xray (shortened from P90X, the guy is a beast and wintering at South Pole this year), Drama (right in the picture, short for Jonny Drama AKA, Mom) and Hollywood (left in the picture, short for…oh, you don’t want to know, but also known as Dad). Even our heavy equipment had radio handles; Delta Quattro for the D4 dozer, Peanut Butter for the Pisten Bully and Mother Tucker for the Tucker SnoCat. Radio handles are like AT thru hiker trail names. You can’t make one up yourself, it is bestowed upon you. You can’t ask for one; that’s the rule. It is an organic process and just sort of happens. Sometimes it is just the person’s name like K-nut or R-becca, or derived from their initials like Taco Nacho. Sometimes the name stands on its own (try “Leo, Leo, Leo, how copy?”. It works.) The best ones have a story behind them like Hollywood’s. Ask the next time you see him, he loves to tell that story!