Antarctic video gallery
First midwinter airdrop to Australian Antarctic station
Video transcript
Dr Nick Gales, Director: A very exciting development in the Antarctic program, we did our very first ever winter airdrop down to one of our stations in Antarctica. It’s a brand new capability for us, working with the RAAF in one of their very large aircraft, a C-17. We were able to drop down mail, some medical equipment and some engineering gear. Our normal pattern is that we have access to Antarctica during the summer only from about October through to March. All of the equipment has to be very carefully planned as to what goes down on the ship, some on aircraft. But once you get to March and the last ship or the last plane departs you have what you have and you have to survive. So this is actually a really important change. It makes it safer to be down there. We can get gear that broke or ran out and we didn’t have spares down there and it just changes the way we can think about working.
Flt Lt Doug Susans, RAAF: We’ll be flying 2000 nautical miles from Avalon down to a drop zone in the vicinity of Casey station on Antarctica. We’ll be airdropping three CDS bundles — that’s a container delivery system bundle — onto the ice and then we’ll be flying back to Hobart. This trip is particularly challenging due to the nature of Casey station being right down in the polar regions of Antarctica. It’s very cold, there’s a lot of icing. A cargo drop is achieved from a C-17 by slowing down to approximately 145 knots, that’s about 270 kilometres per hour. We descend to approximately 5000 feet and we open the back of the aircraft up and electrically release the load and it rolls out the back. As it goes out the back a static line pulls the parachute open and then it falls onto the ground.
Matt Filipowski, Future Concepts Manager: The crews on the ground after the airdrop was completed located them on the drop zone up on the plateau of Antarctica and then they used heavy vehicles and machinery to load those. Each load was approximately 500 kilos each and then transported it the 10 kilometres back to Casey where they unpacked it and checked it all over.
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