Fwd: Mercy Flight: AZSTARNET 9 July, different wrinkles
Chris Weddle
I received this one from a friend back in the USA.
Chris Weddle
RVIB Nathaniel B. Palmer
-----From The Arizona Daily Star-----
Friday, 9 July 1999
Mercy flight on its way to Antarctic
Air Force supply drop extremely dangerous
SEATTLE (AP) - An Air Force cargo jet took off yesterday on a dangerous
mission to drop medicine and other supplies at the South Pole for an
American woman who discovered a lump in her breast and can't be evacuated
until October or November.
Landing at the woman's research station is considered impossible now, during
the dead of winter, with 24-hour-a-day darkness, temperatures as low as 80
degrees below zero and crosswinds of 60 mph.
So a handpicked crew of 19 - including a doctor to treat their frostbite -
will attempt an airdrop, shoving six pallets of supplies out a side door of
their C-141 Starlifter. The packages will parachute 700 feet to the ice.
``The conditions they are flying in are pretty bad,'' said 1st Lt. Lars
Anderson, a spokesman at McChord Air Force Base outside Seattle. ``There's
danger there. There's danger in every mission, but they're trained for it.''
The 47-year-old woman, whose name was not disclosed, works for Antarctic
Support Services, a company that provides services for the National Science
Foundation's Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.
She is among 10 women and 31 men spending the winter in one of the most
isolated spots on Earth. The nearest people are 838 miles away at another
Antarctic research station.
Company spokeswoman Valerie Carroll and others familiar with the mission
would not give details of the woman's job or say whether the lump is
cancerous. Carroll said that the woman had undergone a battery of tests,
including X-rays and a biopsy, and that the results were sent to doctors in
the United States.
She said the woman had a rigorous physical in November before she left for
her yearlong stint at the station, a complex of laboratories and living
quarters covered by a geodesic dome. Had a breast lump been detected, she
would not have been permitted to join the group, Carroll said.
Although he had not reviewed the woman's case, Dr. Rick Clarfeld, a breast
surgeon at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, said she
could be offered the cancer drug tamoxifen or intravenous chemotherapy, both
of which can shrink a breast tumor or cause it to stop growing.
Clarfeld said he occasionally takes similar measures to get IV chemotherapy
to women in remote Alaskan villages.
The Starlifter set out from McChord Air Force Base, landed in Hawaii,
refueled, then head for Christchurch, New Zealand. Accompanied by a KC-10
aerial tanker from Travis Air Force Base in California, it will make the
eight-hour flight to the pole sometime tomorrow, U.S. time.
In addition to medicine for the woman, the emergency drop - the first at the
South Pole in four years - will also include medical gear, mail and fresh
food for her comrades.
``Basically, we have one opportunity to make a drop, so we are dropping any
kind of medication and diagnostic equipment that might come in handy the
next few months,'' Carroll said.
The National Science Foundation is paying for the mission. The cost was
unavailable, although Carroll said it was ``significant, when you consider
the supplies are being transported halfway around the world.''
The crew members will be bundled in extreme-cold-weather gear as the plane
makes two or three passes at 200 mph. They will experience almost
incomprehensible wind chill factors. A flight surgeon is going along just in
case.
The pallets will be marked with chemical lights and strobes, so station
members can quickly recover them before the supplies freeze.
Even in the brief Antarctic summer, planes that land at the South Pole must
be equipped with skis. Once they land, they have to leave their engines
running so they won't seize up in the cold. They can stay only about two
hours before the plane's hydraulic fluids start to freeze.