Hanover
The 11,000-foot-long runway, named Phoenix, was a collaboration between the National Science Foundation and CRREL, which provides infrastructure and logistics support in Antarctica for the federal agency. Like its predecessor, Pegasus, which was built on glacial ice, the new runway offers a vital link between New Zealand and McMurdo Station, the logistics hub for the U.S. Antarctic program.
While their construction differs, both the 25-year old runway and its replacement share an important characteristic — the ability to accommodate heavy wheeled cargo planes, including the C-17 Globemaster III, a large military transport aircraft, and non-military planes. Just one other runway on the continent, an Australian facility, boasts that capability.
Terry Melendy and George Blaisdell, the CRREL research civil engineers who designed and built the structure, with help from several colleagues, traveled to Antarctica three times for the project.
Fuel and other necessities such as medical supplies and food are transported to the continent primarily by ship, just once a year, making access for cargo planes all the more important, Blaisdell said. “If you need parts for a vehicle, you can’t run down to NAPA.”
The new runway broke engineering ground.
Everybody was fairly comfortable with idea of building a runway on glacial ice, but the idea of building one in deep snow for a plane as large as the Globemaster, which operates on wheels, “gave a lot of people pause,” Blaisdell said. “It’s a heavy aircraft, and people know that snow is not all that strong. We had to be able to market this in such a way we gave people confidence that, despite the fact it had never been done before, it was possible.”
Just choosing a location was a complicated process.
The runway couldn’t be too close to mountains or volcanoes and had to be lined up according to wind patterns, so it would be flyable a lot of the time, said Blaisdell, who has a landform in Antarctica named after him.
As part of the search for the best location, they studied weather records and “drilled a bunch of snow cores” to see what the snow qualities had been like there in recent years.
Ideally, they’d hoped to find a spot resembling where Pegasus was sited; thick glacial ice covered with light snow, which reflects light and prevents melting, Blaisdell said. But the terrain, which floats on about 3,000 feet of water, moves 113 feet a year, and those conditions didn’t exist in the area where they needed to build.
All along, the clock was ticking.
Pegasus had begun to deteriorate, and “there were issues” with how many wheeled aircraft could fly in during a season, said Peter West, spokesperson for the National Science Foundation’s Office of Polar Programs.
The alternative would be to use smaller, ski-equipped aircraft, which can land on a separate airfield nearby.
Every year, some 3,500 people come and go from the continent as part of the United States’ Antarctic program, about 10 times as many as the next biggest nation, said Blaisdell, who retired from the National Science Foundation after more than a decade as chief manager of the U.S. Antarctic Program. If Phoenix hadn’t worked out, it would have cut research capabilities in austral summer in half.
During the 15-month-long construction period, they used heavy pneumatic weight carts to compact the snow to create the runway, which is certified to hold 500,000 pounds.
Dealing with the darkness was one of the main challenges they faced, said Melendy, who lives in Norwich. In the winter, it’s totally dark, so construction slowed down.
That’s also the time of year when temperatures often hit minus 40, the “magic number that causes equipment to not work well,” Blaisdell added.
Blaisdell said he expects about 65 flights — most by U.S. aircraft but some by other countries, as well — will go in and out using Phoenix every year.
While that doesn’t sound like much, compared with commercial airports, a number of Air Force bases have runways that “get way less traffic than this one,” he said. Other runways in Antarctica get “maybe a dozen flights a year.”
Runways used by military aircraft require special certification, and last month, after an intensive inspection process, Phoenix got the thumbs-up.
“We’re very happy to have Phoenix coming online because it does make a huge difference,” West said. “Everyone has to come either by ship or by plane. This just adds to the flexibility of what we are able to do with different types of aircraft.”
The certification was a validation of all the work they’d put in, that it “was actually worth the effort,” Melendy said. And, for the client, “a realization their capabilities are going to be continuing.”
And, yes, there was some celebration.
“We’re engineers, so it wasn’t like we did our happy dance out there. We did a high-five and some backslaps,” Blaisdell said.
“You see some very burly guys with greasy Carhartts hugging each other.”
Aimee Caruso can be reached at acaruso@vnews.com or 603-727-3210.