Fifty Years On Ice

An LC-130 Ski-Herk crew from the 109th Airlift Wing, the New York Air National Guard unit based at Stratton ANGB near Schenectady, touched down at the South Pole on 30 October to commemorate the first plane landing at the bottom of the world fifty years ago. The pilot of that historic flight to the South Pole on 31 October 1956, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Gus Shinn, landed a ski-equipped R4D-5 nicknamed Que Sera Sera. To commemorate the half-century anniversary, Maj. Carlyle Norman landed an LC-130H with radio callsign Skier 00 on an Operation Deep Freeze mission in support of the National Science Foundation at the South Pole. The 109th Airlift Wing is the only unit in the world to have the ski-equipped LC-130 aircraft.