runway to skiway

Every year, our little community of about 1000 people makes use of three airfields.

Annual Sea Ice Runway: This airstrip is built on temporary sea ice on the fresh ice in the shipping channel that the ice breakers come through. The Ice Runway sits about 1.5 miles from town and hosts wheeled aircraft until the end of November. The photo is a view of what is left of our Ice Runway after the airfield was moved.

Williams "Willy" Field Skiway: The skiway is used by ski planes. This includes the LC-130 aircraft as well as the Ken Borek fleet of three small privately owned planes. The skiway is built on packed snow on the permanent ice shelf. Because it's about 7 miles out of McMurdo, it is only used as an emergency landing airfield until it is officially put into place after the Ice Runway closes.

Pegasus White Ice Runway: This is packed snow that has become white ice. It is named after the airplane, Pegasus, that crashed near the airfield and is still permanently parked under snowdrifts. Pegasus is the runway where we land our C-17 and other wheeled planes after the Ice Runway is closed. Pegasus is about 10 nautical miles from Station, but nearly 17 miles by our permanent ice roads.

This past weekend marked this year's transition from the Ice Runway to Willy and Pegasus. It means taking down the tower, the galley, the toilets, and ice melter, the departmental trailers, the communication lines, generators, and all other equipment to run the strip. Once this is done, the other airfields become populated with those buildings and equipment and Ice Town becomes Willy Town.

This change also means that the fuel lines get stretched out from our storage in McMurdo through Scott Base via a permanent pipeline and then through temporary hose all the way out to the airfield. We unroll big spools of hoses and eventually fuel our planes with jet fuel by way of these huge tubes. Our fuel lines are marked with blue flags and there are special places in the roads where we drive with care to avoid rupturing the lines.

A few years back, the temporary ice froze over too soon for the fuel tanker to dock in McMurdo, so they anchored the ship to the temporary ice with big beams and rope frozen into the ice (like a "dead man"). Then they ran some of this hose all the way from the tanker back into McMurdo for four miles. Because fuel is so important to our operations down here and the inability for the ship to dock was unexpected, they ended up keeping people on late that season to make the operation happen.