Wednesday night I slept hard, thankful for my nice warm bed after the long cold night in the snow trench. It took everything I had to get up, but we had to since we were to meet Monika, the helicopter coordinator, at 7:30am.
The goal for this meeting was to observe the helo ops at their busiest time of the day, which is first thing in the morning. To begin their day, Monika briefs the helitechs, a rep from the Kiwi Antarctic Program(me), and the rep from PHI, the contractor that actually operates the fleet of helicopters for the USAP. She goes over the schedule for the day and gets everyone on the same page.
Once that was over she brought us into her office to go over a few of the things that she thought we might be able to help her with. One of her biggest pains right now is trying to coordinate all of the different flight requests that come in. There is no standardized method for requesting a helo flight, so she has a notebook full of emails, post-it notes, and other primitive methods that people have used to request a flight. She also shared with us stories of grantees entering incorrect information that throws off her planning all together. One such example is a grantee that originally entered that he’d need a flight for two people and 200 pounds of cargo. However, when he showed up he had 8 passengers (or pax), and 2000 pounds of cargo. That throws off her whole schedule because it means she now needs to find 2-3 flights to handle the load instead of just the one she had planned for.
The helicopter schedule is probably the most restrictive piece of the whole USAP, and drives how many projects can be supported on the ice. Monika’s ideal goal is to get accurate data up front, when the grantees are using the POLAR ICE application to request the support they’ll need for the upcoming season, so that she can come up with a fairly solid schedule during the austral winter (our summer). The schedule changes constantly, so it’s not possible to schedule accurately that far out, but she at least needs to know when the peak request times are so that she can try and move groups around if they’re more flexible with their helo dates. We discussed a few ways to do this and came up with some pretty good ideas that should help her out a lot.
After that we attended a passenger briefing at the pax terminal next to the helo hanger. A helitech goes over the rules of operations for riding in a helicopter such as never approach from the rear, keep all loose items secured when boarding and exiting the air craft, etc. Monika had a helitech give us an overview of what they do and he answered some questions for us as well.
Next, another helitech took us out onto the helo pad for a tour of a 212 helicopter. The program currently has 5 helos that it operates – two A-Stars, two 212s, and an HNO, which is actually a chopper owned and operated by the New Zealand Antarctic Program. Monika shared that it’s not at all uncommon for the Kiwis to fly USAP participants and for us to fly the Kiwis around. The 212 is the largest in the fleet, with an eight-person capacity. The helitech also explained how the sling loads work, where they suspend, or sling, a 15’x15’ cargo net of “excess baggage” from the helicopter as it flies. They can even sling snowmobiles and other heavier items for transport into the field.
This whole time was a flurry of activity, as the five helos are almost always fully engaged, and since it was the first thing in the morning they were all loading up passengers and equipment, and leaving for the field. We saw three of the five helos take off and head out, and watching that is always fun. It’s amazing how precisely the pilots can control those things, especially on this exceptionally windy area of the station right on the bay.
Next we met with Dawn Needham, who coordinates all of the scheduling for the FSTP program. She actually scheduled us for our Happy Camper class, so talking to her made much more sense now than it may have just a few days ago. She’s in charge of not only scheduling Snowcraft I (Happy Camper), but also Sea Ice, Snowcraft II, Altitude, and GPS training. She also coordinates all of the science cargo needed for resupplying existing field camps. The field safety training section in POLAR ICE is pretty basic right now, and we came up with some great ideas to really streamline this process for her, not only for FSTP, but for all of the other training needs on station. Currently the entire training archive records are stored on one Excel spreadsheet, so by subsuming that with POLAR ICE we can make it a much more user-friendly, and secure, application.
After meeting with Dawn we spoke for a while with Mike McClanahan about what we’d been up to and the progress we’ve made with the local install of POLAR ICE. He seemed pleased to learn we were moving forward with a plan to find a permanent home for the application on station.
After a routine afternoon of work and dinner, we met several other IT folks at Gallagher’s for some darts and drinks (CD, of course). We soon discovered that it was karaoke night, and that there isn’t a single halfway decent voice to be found on this entire section of the continent. Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, was downright awful. One of the most pitiful sets of karaoke performances I’ve ever heard. At one point a group of at least 40 people marched in wearing togas, sang “You’ve Lost that Loving Feeling,” and then marched right back out. It was very strange. They were running around town in togas. In Antarctica. And nobody seemed to know why.
There are also a few new photos with this update.
