Wrecked plane

• Language: unknown
• Subjects: South Pole; Hercules; Antarc*; Antarctica; South pole
• Online Access: http://cdm16786.contentdm.oclc.org:80/cdm/ref/collection/antartica/id/64

This was taken during the summer of 1973. It shows a Navy C-130 Hercules, the planes that we fly to the South Pole. It is obviously in not very good shape. This crashed when we were down there. Nobody was killed on the plane. But what happened, they normally will use JATO, or Jet-Assisted Take-Off, from JATO bottles that are strapped to the side of the fuselage, to get off the South Pole, if they have a heavy load. It is not done all of the time, just when they have heavy loads. In this case, the JATO bottles had a problem because, being down there in Antarctica for a number of years, the aluminum had become brittle and apparently broke free of the side of the aircraft, and the JATO bottle took off like a rocket and went through the wing of the C-130 and since the wing contains fuel, it caught it on fire. The aircraft crashed back to the snow and was broken in half. You can see now the tail over to the sharp right that’s been pulled over near to the front. This was a bad thing for people flying in. You would look at that and wonder: “What happened there? Are we going to have that problem too?” So, eventually, what they did is, they got caterpillar tractors there, which were at the South Pole, and they dug a hole in the snow off of the edge of the runway and buried this so that people would not see it. It was kind of nerve-racking and a bad omen to have this broken up airplane sitting right by the edge of the runway. It made a lot of people very nervous.