Fuel and Planes!

This is the South Pole International Pax Terminal.  "Pax" is passenger. Out bound passengers tend to just stand outside and wait for the signal to walk to the plane to board. In bound passengers make a bee line to the station. So it home to a couch, heater and the flight deck radios.

 Two of the many, many fuel tanks we have are in the back ground. The red things in the foreground are large rolling fire extinguishers (They are dry chemical, we don't put out fires with water, water is hard to get and difficult to keep flowing outside). The building in the right half is the fuel pump house.

 I learned to recirculate the fuel through a filter to prep it for a possible fueling of a plane. This is to make sure there is nothing in the nozzles or hoses if there became a need to pump fuel into and airplane. The station actually defuels the LC-130s when they arrive to NPX?SPX (Naval Polar Exchange/South Pole Exchange). This is how we receive fuel to keep the station running. Almost everything is run on AN8 fuel which we off load from the incoming planes. We leave enough fuel in the plane for it to return to McMurdo.

 





I also learned how to take fuel samples and test them for clarity, sediment, water and conductivity. We need to know how to do this because in winter we will be the ones testing and prepping the fuel for that first flight in.

 All of the testing is done inside in a fume hood with cool lab equipment. We only check for clarity outside because it's an easy check to know if the fuel is possibly usable or not. We have very clean fuel.

 Drip pans are used to prevent any spillage. AN8 won't congeal in the cold until after it spends about a week at -90 F.

 I got to park a plane! It was awesome, I love my job. (This actually isn't part of my job, but since I was helping out and learning how to be a "Fuelie" they taught me how to do that too).

 I helped defuel about 3000 gallons of fuel from this plane. The fuel is pumped directly to our fuel tanks in the arches. The fuel on the flight deck is on hand incase we have a smaller plane that stops at the South Pole for refueling.

The whole process of unloading cargo, passengers and fuel and reloading with passengers takes about an hour. You can see the dark coloration of the snow from the plane exhaust.

 I got to declare the plane "off deck" over the radio after it took off.

We will get about 60 more flights this season and when I have time in the morning I will be testing and recording the quality of the fuel (and maybe parking a few more planes).