Travellin’ South

Antarctica’s busiest airfield…?

It’s been pretty manic the last couple of weeks in the tower as Rothera surely became Antarctica’s busiest airfield for a short while! It’s pretty much the end of the field season down here and we’ve had all the aircraft that transited through us come back through on their way north. Various factors combined and it ended up that one night this week we had a total of 12 aircraft overnighting at Rothera – our own Dash-7 and 4 Twin Otters, 2 DC-3 Baslers and another 5 Twin Otters run by Kenn Borek Air for the US and Italian programmes. 12 aircraft is Rothera’s record and I’m proud I can say I was a part of it…

As the majority of the Borek fleet headed north to Punta Arenas the next morning it looked rather empty over on the apron! We’re not done yet though – we still have to pick up our last field party and close down Sky Blu and Fossil Bluff for the winter. We’ve also got the German Basler “Polar 5” staying with us while they conduct some joint work with our own scientists (see the above pic of Polar 5 and our own Twin Otter in formation with cloud probes) and yesterday we took the BBC’s Frozen Planet team flying around the Wilkins Ice Shelf – it was a beautiful afternoon yesterday and you can expect some pretty awesome aero footage next year when it makes it to TV!

So, you can see it’s not all over yet, we’ve still got a few weeks of flying before the Air Unit pack up and head north. After that I get to breath a sigh of relief (no more 6:50am starts!) and get a few relatively quiet weeks to finish up handing over to Mike, my successor, before the ship arrives and takes us home… only 59 days to go!