U.S. ANTARCTIC FLIGHT

Press, Volume XCIII, Issue 27859, 6 January 1956, Page 10

U.S. ANTARCTIC FLIGHT

Dakotas To Set Out From Taieri- ». TRIPHIBIANS MAY REMAIN The two Dakota transports of the United States Antarctic expedition at the Royal New Zealand Air Force station, Wigram, will set out from Taieri for McMurdo Sound between January 23 and January 26. It is unlikely that the two Albatross triphibians at Wiaram will make a second attempt, but they will fly to Taieri with the Dakotas, and will take off for search and rescue work if they are needed. In the main flight last month the Dakotas were flying in company with six other planes, which were co-, operating by passing messages and exchanging the latest information on the weather they were encountering, helping each other with communications, and giving the positions of ships in the chain of vessels acting as homing beacons and rescue stations. The six ships were 250 miles apart, and aircraft were never more than 125 miles from either a ship or from land. In addition. American and New Zealand meteorologists considered mid-Decem-ber the best time for calm weather.

This month there will probably be no other aircraft- flying with the Dakotas. There will be only four ships, and they will be 360 miles apart, thus reducing the chances of efficient search and rescue in the event of a forced landing at sea. At the end of the month the Antarctic summer will be on the wane, and the weather is expected to deteriorate considerably Cape Adare Landing Strip

To help the Dakotas in case they have to land short, the United States task force has laid out an emergency landing strip and installed a fuel cashe at Cape Adare, 1600 miles south of Taieri. The strip is about 100 ft wide and 3000 ft long. One ship will be at McMurdo Sound, the proposed destination, and an icebreaker, the Eastwind or the Edisto, will stand by at Cape Adare. The naval freighter Greenville Victory will be further north and the nearest ship to New Zealand will be the icebreaker Glacier, which will be on its way to Lyttelton. Rear-Admiral George Dufek’s message to the senior pilot of the Wigram group (Lieutenant-Commander Ben Sparks) was laconic: “Plan conduct R4D fly-in January.” “It does not say that the Albatrosses will not fly in, but I think that that is an intentional oversight,” said Commander Sparks, himself an Albatross pilot, yesterday. The four aircraft will leave Wigram for Taieri either on Saturday, January 21, or the day after. The flight from Taieri is expected to begin between January 23 and January 26. The arrangements for forecasting weather for the last flight will operate for this month’s attempt.

If the two Albatross triphibians do not set out for the Antarctic they will act as search and rescue planes out of Taieri. They will take off only if needed, and after the flight will be brought back to Wigram and kept over the winter until the United States task force resumes its activities in the spring. The Dakotas will stay in the Antarctic. Unloading of Ships The time for the flight will depend almost entirely on the ships’ unloading programme. If they are not unloaded completely by the time the flight is due, they may put to sea and then return to finish discharging later. If they are nearly unloaded the flight will be delayed until they can get everything ashore and then take station. “It will be pretty close to the deadline,” said Commander Sparks. If the Albatrosses return to Wigram, Commander Sparks, two other pilots, and five enlisted men, will carry on with flight training and fly each of their planes for an hour and a half every other day to keep them in trim. Three men of the Wigram group will winter with two other men now in the Antarctic, and the five will comprise a special naval aviation group whose task has not yet been defined. LieutenantrCommander Robert E. Graham, senior Albatross plane commander, will be the senior naval airman of the group. He and Lieutenant (jg) Noel D. Eichhorne (Commander Sparks’s navigator) will travel south with the Glacier when it returns to McMurdo Sound—after a stay of two or three days at Lyttelton, where it will take an oil barge in tow. The third man is Lieutenant (jg) Wesley H. Seay, a navigator in LieutenantCommander C. S. Shinn’s Dakota.

Commander Shinn will be making his second flight into the Antarctic in a Dakota. In 1947 he flew a plane 750 miles from the deck of the aircraftcarrier Philippine Sea to land at Little America. The commander of the second Dakota will be Lieutenant-Commander E. J. Frankiewicz.