Trying to get there...

The weather at the sea ice runway for McMurdo and Scott bases has been windy, with blowing snow dunes for several days. People who tried to fly on Friday, tried again yesterday, and are supposed to be on our flight today. Our scheduled plane switched from a Hercules (run by Safair) to the C17 that was scheduled to fly on Friday.

The C17 (left) is our plane, which is much larger than the Hercules (white plane in background, which is the Safair plane chartered by the Italian program from a South African company; grey plane on the far right, which is a US Air Force one.)

Thus, our (now) scheduled plane can accommodate the increasing number of passengers and also has a bunch of cargo. Word is that it is the last C17 scheduled to fly down this year until February. Once it's "warm" near Ross Island, the big planes can't safely land and take off.  Thus, they really want to get this plane and its cargo down south as soon as possible.

Unfortunately, the weather is still windy, and the runway hasn't been cleared - or more likely, they've been working on it but their work keeps getting undone by the wind. Thus, we went from a required arrival time at 6:30 am for check-in and our planned departure briefing at 9:15, to a planned departure briefing at 1:15 pm.

Departure lounge at about 8:45 am

Tyler at our new location in the Christchurch main airport departure lounge.  We'll hang out here for a while,. (I told him, "Smile for Meredith" who drew a great image of him trying to get to Antarctica for our Dream Vortex.)
Hopefully, we'll get out today. In the mean time, I'm enjoying an extra orange.

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