OPERATION DEEP FREEZE: AMERICA’S MISSION TO ANTARCTICA
May 3, 2023Jenna Biter
Operation Deep Freeze
Come spring, Northeasterners start planning beach days at the Jersey Shore, but that isn’t true for some of New York’s Guardsmen. Every April, parka-clad airmen load into ski-equipped cargo planes bound for a colder coast. Like a flock of metallic geese, the LC-130 “Skibirds” fly their passengers north to summer in the Arctic Circle. It is in the high north that air crews from the 109th Airlift Wing prepare for Operation Deep Freeze: America’s annual mission to the other pole.
“We train in Greenland for practice,” Maj. Dia Ham, an LC-130 pilot, told Coffee or Die. “You try to experience as many different flight conditions as possible before you’re allowed to go to Antarctica as the member of a six-person crew.”
National Science Foundation
Auroras Australis fill the night sky over the South Pole Telescope and BICEP Telescope at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, Antarctica. Photo by Matt Young/National Science Foundation.
Because Greenland isn’t very green — the surface of the Danish island is nearly 80% ice — it provides air crews with flight conditions similar to those found on cue-ball-like Antarctica. At both destinations, pilots, like Ham, ski their Hercules cargo planes in to land on snow-covered strips. The experience is similar to a skier navigating a slope, only the LC-130 has roughly 12-foot-long by 5-foot-wide skis.
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