Calibrations before test flight

This morning I thought that getting a little exercise might help, so I walked the mile from the center of McMurdo to the ice runway. It was a plesant walk, with light winds and lots of sunshine. On the way to the ice runway I snapped a couple of pictures of McMurdo Station. It was a beautiful day, warm enough that we were working with out jackets this after noon. After about 25 minutes I finally arrived at the ice runway and took this photo of the 3 Ken Borek Twin Otters lined up next to each other. By this time the wind had picked up so it was much colder out. I wore a lot more warm weather gear tonight having learned my lesson the day before. After dinner Jason and I re-installed my "new" re-sized inlet in the freezing cold conditions. Jason also installed the bench seats in the Twin Otter, so we now have a place to sit while working on the instruments. This puts us one step closer to being ready to fly. Finally, things are starting to look like we are almost done the installation phase. Turns out that a bunch of us still need a little more time to make sure our instruments are working properly, and calibrated so we postponed the first test flight until Friday. Tomorrow, onemembers of our team: Don Blake (from the University of California, Irvine) is heading back to New Zealand and then the U.S. He was the first member of our team to arrive here, and last week spent a few days at the South Pole getting instruments ready to operate over the winter. So in addition to our Twin Otter flights, we will have some year round surface data from South Pole. We wish him a safe trip home.