big plane

Today the first A380 took off. This plane is the largest passenger plane in the world and made it's maiden flight from Singapore to Sydney. It carries up to 850 passengers. To put this in perspective, I realized that they could redeploy nearly the entire population of McMurdo Station on one flight back to New Zealand! That's a big plane!

Speaking of our population, we are near our station's capacity of 1100 people right now. Tomorrow we are receiving in another 80 passengers to bring out numbers up to about 1050. Most of us hope that the people flying to South Pole actually make it there soon on a flight. A string of weather delays has prevented their missions from going through!