Saturday, January 16, 2010

De plane!

Finally after several months of not being able to blog I am finally able to, although it took me several hours to upload these photos.

This collection is of the runway facility, particularly the Sea Ice Runway. We are no longer using this runway and have moved to the Pegasus White Ice Runway/Skiway. The only difference is the ice... White ice is the multi-year ice that is part of the permanent ice shelf, so the Sea Ice runway would melt every year. This year they decided that they are going to make Pegasus a permanent facility to save money. The large orange building is the galley and the morgue. Yes, the morgue. The first picture is where they would wash the bodies. Luckily people don't die very often down here.

Every so often I work out at the runway facility where we serve all four meals (Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner and MidRats). We have to take the Lunch Box out there, which is basically a U-Haul type of truck. Because the ice is getting rough and melty we have installed Mattracks on the truck, so now it's wheels look like a tank! Unfortunately the Mattracks are not fun to drive with and we have to go super slow. Pegasus is about 14 miles from Mac Town, and it takes us about 1-1.5 hours to get there; therefore one meal requires up to three hours of driving. Sometimes it feels fruitless when you serve only 10 people for midrats, but we have contracts that require us to be there to feed the people. Sometime within the next 5 years the galley will be a permanent facility where we can prepare food on-site. Right now we transport the food back and forth bewteen the Mac Town galley.

The people we feed at the runway are Fleet Ops, who groom to runway and the road to the runway; Mac Ops and SOPP who are in charge of the weather station, dispatch and flight controls; the Fire station who are required to be there if there are planes on the field; Cargo, who unload and load the planes; the Air Force/Guard who fly the planes to New Zealand and back, AGE who supply the Air Guard and KBA with the means to fix and maintain the planes; Ken Borek Air, who fly some of the planes around the continent; and often other departments like Fuels and Shuttles.