Yesterday I flew my second mission of the trip down to the Ross Ice Shelf, delivering people and cargo to McMurdo station in Antarctica. As these are the first missions of the year, our payload consists almost entirely of passengers. In my 6 years of flying on the C-17 I have carried a lot of people to a lot of places, and not very often can you feel the palpable energy that fills the cargo compartment like I've felt with the over 100 passengers I've carried to the ice each time so far this season. (The only other time that immediately comes to mind is when I lifted 180 or so army troops out of Iraq on Christmas Eve when the entire cargo compartment broke out in cheer upon takeoff.) Everyone is smiling, overly chatty, and snapping photos as fast as their fingers and camera shutters will allow.
With the large number of passengers comes a correspondingly large work load, especially when we land. Passengers are slow and require constant oversight. Combine that with the "short as humanly possible" amount of time we have spent actually in Antarctica, and I have yet to take a photo outside of the aircraft of Antarctica itself. No worries, I have a couple more missions to get the classic photos in the giant coat with the ice and the airplane in the background.
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