Some of the explorers who had been skiing to the South Pole had made it and were ready for a pick up today, so our planned flight to the remote site was postponed. The plane was taking 3 of the Korean TV team with them, as there would be a few empty seats on the return leg so they could make the trip to the SP. What an experience for the lucky few. I must remember to look out for that episode of “Law of the Jungle” – will be entertaining as we could watch them trying to build an igloo and cook on their solar oven near by camp – they certainly put in the hours…

The weather in the afternoon was expected to get foggy, making it potentially difficult for the plane to land, so it was decided that the South Pole trip would become an overnighter instead and we would depart the following day when the plane had returned.

I made use of the day by making further test flights with the Sirius Pro drone.

The flight plans and actual Sirius flights were going well but we could not debug why the camera was not recording the expected quantities of images. The camera was receiving the trigger command but the images were not stored on the SD card.

It was time for a support call! Iridium satellite provide internet and voice connectivity from the main operations office, so curtesy of ALE, I made a call to Intel’s Sirius experts in Germany for some advice. We couldn’t pin point the issue and suspected it was either due to the camera having difficulty focusing on the ice or the temperature causing the problem.

I was running out of opportunities to carry out test flights for two reasons: My Apple Mac BookAir battery didn’t like the cold temperature so I could only carry out a couple of flights before needing a charge and we also had to operate within short windows when the main aircraft were not landing or taking off.

 

The breaks in the flight testing gave me an opportunity to have a full tour behind the scenes of camp courtesy of David. This is a big operation to keep all the aircraft and camp running smoothly with workshops and engineering facilities as well as an efficient kitchen.  There is also a towed  groomer which is used when the snow runway needs more work than the piste bashers can manage.

 

It was too good an opportunity not to get a Llandeilo Cycling Club photo ticked off too. It’s hard to believe but I also bumped into a couple of locals – Nick Lewis one of the ALE owners originated from South Wales and has been on a couple of rides with the local clubs and even loaned a bike from my local shop County Cycles, and Dean Evans the onsite ICT manager from Llanelli. What a small world it really is.

I would have liked to resolve the issues before departing for the field, but had to accept defeat and planned to try again on the new site. The issue could also have been caused by the very poor DTM but we just didn’t know and time was up. I needed to prep the equipment and myself for the remote trip tomorrow.