Had a busy day at work today on the Dayshift. That's right. I said busy! There is much more activity on the dayshift than on graves. Most of the activity centers around answering phones but I actually had a "real" call today! We had a LC-130 take off from here to fly into a field camp at Pine Island Glacier (aka PIG) and shortly after takeoff the tower came over my radio to declare that the aircraft has a hydraulic problem and was returning to the skiway. (A little background, the Sea Ice Runway is now closed - the ice is no longer thick enough to hold large planes. That runway was about 1.5 miles from the station. Now all aircraft are flying in and out of Pegasus Airfield which is about 15 miles from town. It consists of a runway on ice and a couple of skiways - planes have to have skis to land and take off from there. This will be the airfield that I will fly out of when I go home. I flew into the Sea Ice Runway when I got here.) I asked the tower if they had an "In Flight Emergency" and they said, "Back at you". I had no idea what THAT meant! All I know is is that having problems with hydraulics on a large military aircraft, a problem so bad that they were going to return to the skiway MUST be bad so I toned out the station and treated it like an IFE! They had a plane fuel of cargo, 1 passenger, 9 crew members and gasoline and propane and an "issue" with hydraulics! Of course I pissed off the tower by treating it this way because they didn't SAY there was an IFE. Whatever. My chief and my boss said I did the right thing because as it turns out they circled the airfield for 40 minutes trying to get things to work (and burn off some fuel if the gear/skis could not come down and had to belly land). The plane landed safely on the skiway.
Also today and yesterday they have been setting off explosives to bust off corners of the ice pier to get it ready for first the fuel ship and then the supply ship to come in. Here is a link to view yesterday's blast:
https://s-static.ak.facebook.com/rsrc.php/v1/y2/r/5l8_EVv_jyW.swf?v=295306620590734&ev=0
As you can imagine I had to do a bunch of stuff at work before the blast like make announcements over all the radios station-wide and send the crews out to make sure no one gets hurt. I could feel and hear both blasts in the Firehouse. Pretty wild!
Our television and radio service is provide by the Armed Forces Network. We have a radio station and a TV station here where people volunteer to spin records and the TV station has 2 channels that show movies, another channel has announcements about happenings going on, i.e. travelogue times, science lecture info, what the hours are for medical, what's for lunch and dinner, etc. and then 4 other stations that show football games, news and some network TV. They have a contest each day to guess the common theme of the movies shown on one of the movie channels and if you win they show your picture and give you some candy. I won yesterday! Here's what was shown on TV:
And finally for today, I am missing some things. I am missing 2 ply toilet paper, nighttime at night, my animals and as Laurie K. mentioned, Egg Nog Shakes from Jack in the Box. Thanks for bringing THAT one up L2! But today before I left work the chief sent us all an e-mail about redeployment! It looks like it will start around February 15th! I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I am one of the first ones on the first flights back home!
No comments:
Post a Comment