South with the Sun

by Lynne Cox

  Sarah wrote an introduction to Colonel Smith for me, and she gave me more details on his background. She said Colonel Smith was known as the Ice Ambassador. He was the U.S. Air Force representative as well as commander in Antarctica for Operation Deep Freeze. His mission was to work with the National Science Foundation and to support the scientists in Antarctica. He worked with the forty-four countries—their scientists, representatives, and support personnel—who operated under the Antarctic Treaty. The central theme of the Antarctic Treaty was that the Antarctic continent would be used only for peaceful purposes. No country could make new territorial claims within Antarctica, and there would be mutual cooperation. And the environment in Antarctica would be preserved. In addition, he was in charge of all U.S. Air Force rescue operations in Antarctica.

  When I heard about Colonel Smith, I realized that he was the man fulfilling Admiral Byrd’s legacy as the commander in Antarctica. It took me a while to figure out how to write to him.

  On June 22, 2008, I was on the Seal Beach Pier in California, staring out across the choppy waters of the Pacific Ocean at sunset, watching bright orange-gold sunlight spread along the shoulders of the waves, and illuminating the larger three-foot-high waves that were curling and sliding onto the soft sand, releasing energy like an exhaled breath. I was trying to figure out how I could get to Antarctica to write about Amundsen and the 109th Air Wing when my cell phone rang.

  “Hello, this is Ron Smith,” a man said in measured way, with a wonderful Baltimore accent. It was the air force. I thought, I’ve got to tell him everything in three minutes or less. He’s probably so busy. I told him that I needed to fly with the 109th and write about its mission in Antarctica and how it connected to Amundsen’s vision. He asked some questions about the deadline for my book and understood that I could not make the NSF application deadline for the artists’ and writers’ program that year, and that the following year would be too late. He advised me to get in touch with the air force’s public affairs office. If they thought it was a good project, they would send my book proposal to the secretary of the air force to request support for it. Thrilled that the air force would consider my request, I did a little dance on the pier.

  As soon as I got home, I wrote the proposal and sent it off to the public affairs office and waited for its approval. On July 28 the approval came through from the Pentagon. I was elated. Piece by piece the project was coming together. I passed the approval letter from the Pentagon to the 12th Air Force public affairs office, and they in turn forwarded it to the National Science Foundation. Since Antarctica was a joint mission between the U.S. Air Force and the National Science Foundation, I needed approval from both groups.

  Weeks passed.

  Then one day I received a call from Ron Smith. He said that he had e-mailed a satellite photo of Antarctica. He wanted to know if I could open the file and take a look at the image.

  He began by explaining that the LC-130s and C-17s that supported Operation Deep Freeze flew from Christchurch, New Zealand, to McMurdo Sound. The flight from Christchurch to McMurdo Station took ten hours. I looked at the satellite photo. The Antarctic continent was the size of the United States and Mexico. Antarctica was shaped like an enormous stingray with the tail of the stingray pointing up toward the southern tip of South America. Ross Island, home of the U.S. base at McMurdo Station, was located on McMurdo Sound, and 730 miles south of McMurdo Station, near the stingray’s head, was the South Pole.

  USAF colonel Ron Smith, left, and Lieutenant General David Deptula, the commander of Joint Task Force Operation Deep Freeze, landing in Antarctica, January 2006.

  From McMurdo Station, 920 miles to the left wing of the ray was the WSD, an acronym signifying the WAIS (West Antarctic Ice Sheet) Divide research site. On the right wing of the stingray was a new station for Antarctica’s Gamburtsev Province (AGAP), a research project studying the Gamburtsev mountain range, which is buried under the glacier. It was in a very remote area. It had never been explored. I wondered if we knew more about the surface of the moon than we did the continent of Antarctica.

  Emperor penguins with LC-130—flight through the water and flight through the air.

  As Ron briefed me on Antarctica, I thought how fortunate I was to have a colonel who had spent eleven seasons there briefing me about the place, describing the satellite image and what I was viewing. Maps and charts always fascinated me. My experience, though, was with nautical charts. An aeronautical chart was so different; it was an entirely different perspective, looking down from space upon the Antarctic continent.

  Ron knew Antarctica. Long before he was a colonel, he was an LC-130 navigator, and he was trained to be clear, concise, and descriptive to help guide the pilot and copilot. But he was also a poet, and he selected his words in a way that was very much like the way a fine artist mixed his paints to find just exactly the right shade of a color to apply to his canvas to share his vision. He was describing Antarctica to me as a vast breathtaking wilderness, an icy desert where temperatures dropped to minus 120 Fahrenheit degrees in winter, and where massive mountain ranges rose to more than fourteen thousand feet. It was an environment that was intensely harsh and unpredictable, and it could become very dangerous. One dumb oversight or stupid mistake could make life suddenly very tenuous.

  Ron redirected my attention to the satellite map, to a place near the back of the stingray’s right wing. This area was where McMurdo Station was built. It was on Ross Island, a volcanic island with two predominate mountains, Mount Erebus, an active volcano, towering 13,282 feet above McMurdo, and Mount Terror, an inactive volcano with a height of 10,597 feet. Mount Erebus constantly emitted a sulfurous plume thousands of feet into the air.

  Ron explained that the United States shared Ross Island with the New Zealanders. The New Zealanders’ Scott Base was located about four miles from McMurdo Station. The U.S. Air Force and the Royal New Zealand Air Force were great friends and colleagues. Within walking distance of McMurdo Station were the two huts Scott and Shackleton had built before they made their attempts to reach the South Pole. Because of the cold, dry air, both Shackleton’s and Scott’s huts were well preserved and looked pretty much as they had one hundred years ago, when the two men had camped out in Antarctica.

  The main mission for the 109th Air Wing was to fly scientists, support personnel, and equipment to various research stations throughout the Antarctic continent. Critical to achieving the mission were the runways.

  In most parts of the world, pilots preferred taking off and landing on runways that were free from ice and snow, but as a way to illustrate how different flying in Antarctica was, the only two runways that the U.S. Air Force used were made of either ice or snow.

  Pegasus was a glacial-ice runway about a forty-five-minute drive from McMurdo Station, and it was used by C-17s, enormous cargo aircraft, and LC-130s, smaller aircraft. The C-17 and LC-130 landed on Pegasus on wheels. The other runway was Williams Field—a skiway where the LC-130s landed on the snow using their skis. Williams Field was about thirty minutes from McMurdo.

  For years the U.S. Coast Guard supported Operation Deep Freeze by preparing the sea ice for an ice runway. The coast guard used an icebreaker to create a smooth path of open water that refroze and became the ice runway. But before the ice refroze, the coast guard played the critical role of “pathfinder” for the soon-to-follow tanker vessel and cargo vessel from the Military Sealift Command. Without the icebreaker there would be no bulk fuel or supplies getting into McMurdo to carry out the yearlong mission. Because of the low funding priority of the U.S. icebreaker fleet, the U.S. Coast Guard can no longer operate autonomously in the Antarctic mission and must rely on foreign-contract icebreakers.

  At the end of our conversation, I realized how important it was for the United States to have more icebreakers for Antarctica and also for the Arctic. As the sea ice melts during the next ten years, Arctic waters will open and there will be an increase in shipping, commerce, and exploration. There will be in
creased pressure on the Arctic environment, and a dire need for the United States to be able to respond to potential problems. It also occurred to me that there would be a greater need for the U.S. Senate to ratify the Law of the Seas treaty, a treaty that defines the rights and responsibilities of the world’s nations concerning the world’s oceans and also sets guidelines for territorial limits for business, the environment, and management of the ocean’s resources. The Law of the Seas treaty could help lead to mutual cooperation between the nations of the world, like the Antarctic Treaty, which focuses on scientific research, collaboration, and peace.

  Sitting back in my chair, I realized how fortunate I was to learn about Antarctica from a man who had spent a large part of his career working on and above the continent and who was carrying on Byrd’s and Amundsen’s legacy.

  CHAPTER 21

  Antarctic Aviation

  Admiral Byrd fulfilled Amundsen’s vision of Antarctic flight as the way to explore Antarctica, and in doing so Byrd—along with many other explorers—opened the continent to discovery. Although the aircraft became more modern, and aircrews better trained and more skilled, the one factor that didn’t change was the Antarctic environment.

  Colonel Ron Smith explained that Antarctic weather conditions are constantly changing. The weather can change from flat calm to screaming hurricane-force winds in a matter of minutes.

  Antarctica has its very own weather systems. Its weather originates off the Antarctic coast and over the high Polar Plateau, the area where Amundsen, Scott, and Shackleton climbed and traversed for months in their quests to reach the South Pole.

  The Polar Plateau is shaped like a wedding cake, with the plateau being the smooth, high, iced top of the cake. The Transantarctic Mountains run between the Polar Plateau and the Rockefeller Plateau. As a result of radiational cooling, the cold, dense, heavy air on top of the Polar Plateau spills down the sloping terrain. The cold, heavy air, propelled by gravity, accelerates down the tiers of the wedding cake and tears out across McMurdo Station and out along the Ross Ice Shelf.

  These are katabatic winds and are most commonly found blowing off the large and elevated ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland. The buildup of high-density cold air over the ice sheets and their elevation brings into play enormous gravitational energy, propelling the winds to well over hurricane force. These winds in Greenland are called Piteraq, and they are most intense whenever a low-pressure area approaches the coast.

  Within twenty minutes, a katabatic wind could blow through McMurdo and ground all flights, making it impossible to land or take off.

  Predicting the movement and the timing of storms approaching Antarctica is extremely challenging. There is one weather satellite that can see only one shallow angle of Antarctica. There is a twelve-hour gap between views that the satellite can capture.

  Communications in Antarctica are also a challenge. There are communication satellites, but their use is also limited, and it is extremely costly to make a telephone call.

  What really fascinated me was that navigation in Antarctica was different from in other parts of the world and full of challenges. Because of the magnetic variations caused by the South Magnetic Pole, compasses don’t work in the area. And because of the geometric location of the South Pole, even the new systems for aircraft navigation don’t work very well.

  Ron explained that by holding up a globe and looking at the top or the bottom of it, you see that the lines of longitude converge at the geographic poles. When an aircrew climbs into a cold aircraft at the South Pole, the GPS can’t get a position, and it spits out random numbers. To find the aircraft’s position, the navigator uses a sextant and shoots the sun. The navigator attaches the sextant to a window in the ceiling of the LC-130, and takes a series of sun shots to calculate the position and direction the aircraft is heading.

  There was something that was very beautiful to me in this—the air force navigators are as connected to the sun and to the stars for navigation as Amundsen was. The sextant Amundsen had used was very simple. The aviators’ sextant is more refined and precise. It has to be. On a good day Amundsen traveled twenty-four miles, while the aircrews in the LC-130s travel at a speed of three hundred miles per hour.

  The air force also uses a grid system for navigation in the Arctic and Antarctica. The grid is composed of a web of green squares, with one inch equaling sixty miles. The green grid is drawn on the aeronautical chart, and through a series of measurements and calculations, coupled with sun shots and calculations, and radar, the navigators can see where they are in the airspace and direct the pilots to their destination.

  There is so much more to flying in Antarctica. Ron told me it is as much art as it is a science. More than anything, I wanted to see how the aircrews flew and the art and science of Antarctic flight.

  I contacted the 109th Air Wing in Schenectady, New York, and requested a visit so I could do background research to gain a better understanding of how they achieved their mission in Antarctica.

  Before I spoke with them I needed to be prepared. That was one of the reasons for my fascination with Amundsen. He was so pragmatic, and so organized. That was a large part of why he succeeded. He had my admiration, and I wanted to go to meet with the 109th Air Wing and learn from them. Socrates, the Greek philosopher, said that in order to ask a question, you need to know half the answer. I needed to know so much more before I could ask any questions.

  Racking my brain, I tried to think who I knew that might know something about this world of polar flight. Ken Hansen, one of my old friends, had been a U.S. Marine who was an F-4 radar intercept officer in Vietnam (the RIO also acts as an aircraft navigator). He had the best stories about flight, about emergency situations, how pilots and navigators held things together and figured out how to save the aircraft and themselves. He taught me a lot about the g-forces that act on pilots and RIOs in F-4s and the G-suits they wore to pump blood up from their legs, back up through their bodies into their brains so they wouldn’t pass out when they were “pulling g’s.” He gave me insights into their survival training, and we talked a lot about cold-water survival. He said that in training he was told that he would have a maximum of twenty minutes’ survival time if something went wrong with the F-4 and he had to eject into the cold waters off northern Japan.

  That bothered me because I didn’t believe it was true. As in any case, so much about survival depended on the individual’s conditioning and mental attitude, and what was going at the moment something happened. Thinking like that limited a person’s chances of survival. Ken was one of those who inspired me to write, and he said, “All you have to do is to take what you do, experiences that most people will never have, and explain them in a way that they can feel it, they can experience it. If you can do that, you’ll have succeeded.”

  Because Ken had been an F-4 RIO, I told him what I’d learned from Colonel Smith about the LC-130 navigators and the way they used sextants to navigate at the South Pole. This really piqued his interest.

  Apollo 11 was the first to land on the moon; its crew was made up of Michael Collins, Neil Armstrong, and Buzz Aldrin. While Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin touched down in the Eagle, the lunar lander, and walked across the Sea of Tranquility on the moon’s surface, Michael Collins, the command-module pilot, remained behind in the spaceship Columbia and orbited the moon, waiting—as we waited, glued to the television—for Armstrong and Aldrin to return to the spacecraft.

  Ken mentioned he had read that the Apollo crew had learned how to use a sextant for backup, in case the navigational systems went out during the flight, so they could steer by the stars. It sounded amazing and romantic. Astronauts who gazed at planet Earth from space could use the stars to guide them home. Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins needed a patch to symbolize Apollo 11. Mike Collins knew the lunar lander was going to be called the Eagle, so he traced a picture of an eagle from a photo in a National Geographic book. Because the Apollo 11 was a mission of peace, he drew an olive branch, symboli
zing peace, in the eagle’s talons. He gave the design idea to the NASA team, and they used it.

  Ann Collins, Mike’s daughter, is a friend. She recently contacted me because Mike, at age seventy-eight, was starting to do triathlons. He was doing great with his running and cycling, but he needed some help with his swimming technique. She was also concerned about him swimming in Florida waters with sharks and with alligators.

  When I called Mike to ask him about sextant navigation in space, at first all he wanted to talk about was swimming. It was something he wanted to perfect. He was warm, helpful, and inquisitive.

  We talked about body position in the water; he said that he tended to be a sinker. It is all about the breathing, I told him. Try to think of your lungs as balloons: relax, draw in a deep breath, and the balloons fill with air, and you float. If you’re tense, the balloons only fill partway, and you won’t float as high in the water. Think of swimming as returning to space and to zero gravity, I told him. I gave him a drill to find his floating point, and we talked about finding his body position in the water. And then I asked him if he had used an aviator’s sextant to steer the Apollo 11 spacecraft.

  Mike explained that he and Armstrong and Aldrin learned the positions of fifty stars, and how to use the sextant to indicate their position, but only as a backup. In flight they used the sextant to sight on stars to update or make more accurate their inertial guidance platform.

  Mike wanted to know why I was interested, and I told him what I’d learned from Ron about navigation at the South Pole. He was surprised GPS didn’t work well at the South Pole.

  He patiently described the global positioning satellite systems—GPS. He said that in the 1970s there were more than twenty medium earth-orbiting satellites that transmitted signals from space to GPS receivers, and this navigational system enabled astronauts and aviators to determine the spacecraft’s or aircraft’s location, speed, distance, and time. He added that the spacecraft crews primarily used inertial navigational systems—INS. He explained that INS uses motion-sensing devices—gyroscopes and accelerometers—along with computers to help them navigate. He was intrigued that the INS system also didn’t work well at the South Pole. What was wonderful in all of this was that I’d asked him one simple question, about using a sextant for navigation, and through that gained a better understanding of his mission with Apollo 11 and how he navigated through space. There was something really amazing in being able to learn this from the person who flew the first manned mission to the moon. While he had achieved so much, he was willing to share what he knew.