Slashdot Mirror
Stroke Victim Stranded At South Pole Base
Hugh Pickens writes "Renee-Nicole Douceur, the winter manager at the Amundsen-Scott research station at the South Pole, was sitting at her desk on August 27 when she suffered a stroke. 'I looked at the screen and was like, "Oh my God, half the screen is missing."' But both the National Science Foundation and contractor Raytheon say it would be too dangerous to send a rescue plane to the South Pole now, since Douceur's condition is not life-threatening. Douceur's niece Sydney Raines has set up a Web site that urges people to call officials at Raytheon and the National Science Foundation. However, temperatures must be higher than -50 degrees F for most planes to land at Amundsen-Scott or the fuel will turn to jelly. While that threshold has been crossed at the South Pole recently, the temperature still regularly dips to 70 degrees below zero. 'It's like no other airfield in the U.S.,' says Ronnie Smith, a former Air Force navigator who has flown there about 300 times. A pilot landing a plane there in winter, when it is dark 24 hours a day, would be flying blind 'because you can't install lights under the ice.' The most famous instance of a person being airlifted from the South Pole for medical reasons was that involving Jerri Nielsen FitzGerald, a doctor who diagnosed and treated her own breast cancer. Using only ice and a local anesthetic, she performed her own biopsy with the help of a resident welder. When she departed on October 16, 1999, it was the earliest in the Antarctic spring that a plane had taken off."
I spent one year as the leader of the Norwegian Antarctic research station (Troll).
We did not have winter flights either, but we had plans for doing it.
We had a set of airport lights we could place along the runway, complete with PAPI lights to guide incoming planes. These were not permanently mounted, but would only require a couple of hours to get in place. I find it odd that Amundsen-Scott does not have something similar.
The real problem is weather, a little bit of wind, and the lights disappear in snow drift. Another problem is that the runway must be cleared of snow, which is a considerable amount of work that is also dependent on the weather.
The problem is that the C-17's have wheels. Unless things have changed recently, Amundsen only has a snow field, not an ice runway like McMurdo. Landing anything other than a twin-otter or LC-130 at Amundsen probably wouldn't be classified as a "landing" and definitely would be a one-way trip (note the L before the C-130 - it's not a normal Herky-bird).
Another issue is that the LC-130 doesn't have the legs to make CHC-Amundsen-CHC non-stop. Therefore, it has to land at McMurdo at least once. That means that the weather has to be agreeable to allow the mission to happen (putting aside the issues with fuel jelling and gasket failure at the Amundsen temperatures). In early October, some days the weather at McMurdo is good, but it's not the rule. Nasty storms this time of year.
While the situation is quite sad, most of the damage in a stroke occurs in the first hour, which has long sense passed. Rehab is the only treatment at this point. Another stroke may happen, and medical intervention could reduce that chance, but a chance is an awfully big dice-roll that involves a full flight-crew.
Having been the guy who's made the call to not fly a rescue mission, I sympathise. However, killing 3 people (or 7 in my case) to potentially save 1 person is a hell of a call to make. My personal risk tolerance is about E-2. However, when the risk is killing the entire crew, it drops, precipitously. Not only do you risk killing the crew, but you also lose capacity to support other rescue missions. Killing a crew to rescue someone who's stable is not a good idea. I've burried too many friends for those types of missions.
As for the medical attendant, well, again, consider the risk. That's a 3rd person to kill on the flight, and substantially limits the fuel I can carry, the choice of aircraft I have, and makes the high altitude takeoff more dangerous, particularly with a light aircraft.