Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Antarctica or Bust


McMurdo Station, Antarctica. We arrived in McMurdo Friday Dec 4, 2009 at around 2:00pm local time. I say around 2:00pm because after 30 hours of travel and going through 19 timezones, I barely know what day it is let alone the time. I might add that the 30 hours was only to get to Christchurch, New Zealand. It was another 5 hours on a C-17 to get to McMurdo. I'm definitely not complaining though, because we managed to make the trip in one attempt. While on the shuttle from the airport we heard people talk about boomeranging three times before finally making to the ice so we all feel pretty lucky.
Everything went smoothly the morning of our flight. No one on our team missed the shuttle or anything of the sort, and everyone seemed to have good luck with the Extreme Cold Weather (ECW) gear. Although, there were the expected complaints about the Bunny Boots (I actually think they're pretty comfortable).
We went through our first briefing the day we arrived and have several more in the first week. Dr. Hale and I are the only two of our team that have been here before so we're aware that things will move a little slowly in the first few days, which is good considering the jet lag we're all still trying to shake.


We just got access to our shipping container so we can look inside and see how things fared in the journey. From first glances, everything appears to be fine. We pulled out our Yak-54 UAS to get it ready for flight as we will perform flights with the Yak prior to getting the Meridian out. Both systems use the wePilot autopilot, so the Yak will help us make sure we're not going to have any geographically related problems with any of the sensors. We also pulled the Meridian avionics box out for inspection. Everything looks good inside and it has been approved for flight.
At this time we're just waiting to get everyone through the training process, which should take up most of this week. Hopefully we will be able to get a Yak-54 flight off by the weekend.

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