Last Day at Summit

Here it is. It is my last day at Summit Camp. With the new flight period we had our second flight today. It was a Kanger-Summit-Thule-Kanger flight. The flight was designated a cargo flight which was supposed to take out a T-4 pallet. What is a T-4 pallet? It is four regular pallets attached together into one. This T-4 weighed in at 19,600 lbs.

Today's Load Master for the LC-130 was undergoing a qual test, so she was being asked to do lots of good stuff today. To start off, she had to do a Combat Drop of the 3 pallets they brought to us. A Combat Drop is where they shove the pallets out the back of the plane while it is still moving. After this fun, they had to load this monster 19,600 lbs load onto the plane and then take off. This was a lot of fun to watch. Even the regular crew on station have not seen anything like this. When the LC-130 was ready to leave, they goosed it all the way down to the end of the runway to turn around. Nobody could understand why they did it. When they came back on their take off run, they used every single inch of the skiway. The skiway is 2 miles long and they just got the main skis off of the snow surface as they crossed the end of the skiway flags. The photos are spectacular to see. I will try and get hold of them.

Where do I go from here? I will be in Kellyville for two nights and one day. This will allow me to take a shower and wash my clothes before heading back to CONUS on Thursday (CONtinental United States) . Then according to the plans, I should fly out on the rotator ANG flight on Thursday morning, catch a United flight at 5:30 pm back to Denver via Chicago. If all goes as planned, I should be home around 11 pm Thursday night, and the end of my adventure.

I want to thank everybody for their support and their emails. I am looking forward to seeing everybody in the coming weeks.

Cheers,

Mike O