Recce flights and put-in

The first recce flight took place on 3rd December, at the tail end of a fuel supply flight to Byrd Station. Some two hours were spent over the Skelton Névé and Taylor Glacier area obtaining photographs and searching out a landing site.^* Our original plan called for a landing as close to the Boomerang Range as possible but this was not to be. The recce flight (by C130 Hercules) revealed an impressive amount of undulating blue ice or sastrugi over most of the névé. A wheeled landing was hinted at but it was finally decided that a second recce flight was necessary. This took place on 6th December and was mainly devoted to low level runs and a number of trial touch-downs. The general impression was that a landing on the Skelton Neve was out of the question. To keep the project alive I immediately proposed that we be put in on the plateau where we knew that the T.A.E. Beaver aircraft had landed while stocking the Plateau Depot in 1957. And so on 12th December we left Williams Field with this plan in mind. Major Noll, realising that a plateau landing would add many days of page 14 unproductive travelling to our programme, was determined to make a landing on the Skelton Névé and spent a further hour in trial landings. Just as bumpy trial touch-and-go landings were becoming a monotonous habit, we hit a patch of snow, the props went into reverse pitch, the C130 jolted to a halt, we threw 7,000 pounds of supplies on to the snow in a suffocating atmosphere of pure kerosene fumes, and the plane raced off, covering us with powder snow and blowing packets of dehydrated meat and vegetables for miles. We had arrived at our base camp very suddenly, a few miles northwest of Névé Nunatak, on the eastern side of the Skelton Névé.