by Ron Kilber (rpknet@aztec.asu.edu)

Saturday, June 28, 1997

Narsarsuaq, Greenland

After meeting for complimentary breakfast at 7 AM in the Narsarsuaq Hotel dining room, it's a short 3-minute bus ride back to the airport. While Wes and crew prepare the airplane for our next leg, I'm off looking for an Internet connection. I was unable to make a modem-phone connection last night from my hotel room because the interface was incompatible with mine, but one hotel employee said they have an Internet terminal at the airport.

Finally, one member of air traffic control tells me that he used to have Internet access, but management revoked most of the staff privileges because there was too much surfing on the web going on. But the pilot of the shuttle helicopter still has access. Only problem is, he's off flying and won't return for 30 minutes or so. The other problem is that Bob wants to leave in about 40 minutes. Either I find someone with the password to the Internet, or yesterday's progress report will stay on the laptop hard disk drive.

As a dog often reaps reward by snooping with his nose, I decide to have a look around the administration area of the terminal building. When I walk into the Ice Patrol office, I notice a gentleman composing a document at a computer. When I ask him, he says he doesn't have access to the Internet. After explaining our mission and my objective, Borge Richs doesn't hesitate to help me find a way to get on the Net. He knows Soren Larsen, and he is known to have access to the Internet.

A quick phone call reveals that Soren isn't all the way up yet, but by the time Borge and I drive over to his apartment next to the hotel, he'll be all dressed, face splashed, and have the computer up and running.

Not all things in life go smoothly. We're not able to do much at Soren's computer except post a short message to the Wings of Liberation Guestbook. If we had more time, we might have succeeded, but the C-53 is leaving in 10 minutes, so I begin resigning myself to the fact that any update to the Internet will have to wait until we reach Iceland.

While Soren and I have been fiddling around, Borge was off making another phone call. Now he says he's found another computer, and if we hurry over to another friend's apartment, he'll have his file transfer capability up and running by the time we get there

When we arrive at his home, he's ready for the already-prepared diskette, but the only problem is that his computer is a Macintosh. We can't find the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) client, and I know nothing about his software. He's been going through a software update, and not everything has been installed on his hard drive yet.

But one thing we can do is bring up the "Wings of Liberation" home page on his computer monitor. Fortunately, as I only remember now, my server in Philadelphia comes with file-manager-access capability via Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP), but my thirty minutes of time is up, and Bob's probably already starting the C-53 engines. I'll be holding up things if I don't leave for the airport right now.

Using his cell phone, my new Mac computer friend makes a phone call to the airport, and learns that the fuel truck is still in front of our airplane. That means we have a little more time, and that's all we need to make an HTTP update.

After successfully updating the C-53 site, Borge and I return to the Ice Patrol office in the airport terminal building. On the way inside, we find that Wes is washing his hands, so I was able to post an update without holding up the show. As with most success in life, it only arrives at the eleventh hour.

Today we lift off from Greenland at 10:30 AM local time, and after making a full circle while climbing out, we fly back over the airport and take up a heading of 95 degrees. It isn't long before I notice the thin air again as we climb through 12,000 feet. The reduced amount of oxygen in the air always produces a sense of uneasiness for me. Already we have a ground speed of 180 knots.

Not all glaciers meet the waters edge. Some go only far enough to reach dry land, then they seem to melt a little and form small rivers to the fjords. As we travel farther inland, it's apparent most of this country is a high mesa of ice and snow, and wherever there is a valley down to the sea, there is a glacier, too

I can't help wondering just how old those glaciers are. From here, some of the glaciers look to be maybe twenty miles long. Others, I'm sure much longer. Knowing they measure glacier movement in inches per day, I wonder how old the ice is on the leading edge, before it melts or breaks off into those waters below. How long does it take a given chunk of ice to move from the beginning of the glacier to its end?

One foot of movement per day would take a glacier about 15 years to move only one mile, or 300 years to move twenty miles. Then again, assuming only two inches of movement per day, the nose of those glaciers down there started out about the time they switched the calendars from B.C. to A.D. The longer and bigger glaciers? Who knows? But now, most certainly, we're talking biblical times here.

At this latitude, it isn't far across the country of Greenland, and on the eastern edge the mountains are higher and poke through the icecap. Already we can see the fjords on the eastern coast. Two glaciers below us meet the waters of the mile-wide fjord, and it appears there are plenty of 300-foot-wide icebergs.

Greenland is the world's largest island, covering 840,000 square miles. That's almost one fourth the size of the US. Eighty percent of Greenland is ice cap. The north to south distance of the ice is so great that a C-53 would run out of fuel flying from one end to the other. The width of the ice sheet is so wide it approaches the distance from Goose Bay to Narsarsuaq. Ten percent of all the ice on earth is in Greenland. Averaging about 5,800 feet in thickness, the ice cap reaches 11,000 feet in the middle of the island, and is contained within a basin by the mountains around the margins. In the northern interior the base of the ice is 1,000 feet below sea level. Core samples indicate a 300,000 year record of accumulation of volcanic ash, dust, snow and ice, which has been continuously frozen and undisturbed.

Its 1995 population was about 58,000, about one tenth of Wyoming, the least populated state in the US. It was first settled in 985 by the Nordic people under the leadership of Eric the Red, who is the father of Leif Ericson, one of the first Europeans to reach North America.

The East Greenland Current originates in the Arctic Ocean and flows southward along the east coast of Greenland, bringing large fields of ice with it, then turns north to the Labrador Sea. The cold waters surrounding the country account for the perpetual sub-freezing temperatures of the ice cap.

Looking north it's difficult to discern the sky from the icecap, and the view brings to mind the story of one pilot who was flying across Greenland some years ago. He was in what is known as white-out conditions, unable to tell the sky from the terrain. Flying on instruments and unwittingly too low, he soon found his propellers making a loud noise as they made gentle contact with the icecap. When the propellers stopped turning, he soon found himself motionless in the middle of nowhere. In other words, he made a wheels-up landing on top of the icecap -- and lived to tell about.

Also, somewhere up the coast, off our left wing, is the site of the Lost Squadron. That's where six brand new P-38 Lightnings and two B-17 Flying Fortresses crash landed on the icecap while ferrying across the North Atlantic during WWII. They had to. They ran low on fuel after being forced to return from a severe storm over the water on the way to Iceland. Luckily, all crew members survived, twenty-five in all, and one pilot, Bob Wilson, lives in my home-state of Arizona.

After about an hour, we're already over the ocean again. Our compass heading is 112 degrees, and the GPS tells me we have 518 nautical miles of ocean ahead of us. The visibility looking north is excellent, and probably 100 miles or better. Looking south it's not quite as clear, plus there is a high ceiling. The seas look calmer than they did yesterday, having longer swells and troughs and no white caps at all.

Even if the visibility were good enough, we couldn't see the coast of Iceland. That's because we are only high enough to see the horizon, which, I'm guessing now, is less than 150 miles away. We'd have to be much higher to see all the way to Iceland, due to the curvature of the earth.

The curve of the earth is much more pronounced than we realize. I once calculated that one end of the long San Mateo Bridge in the San Francisco area is approximately 65 feet lower than the other. This is due to the curvature of the earth, like a ship at sea hidden from coastal viewers when 7 or 8 miles out. In fact, when driving across that bay, for this reason, you cannot see from one end of the bridge to the other, only the horizon in the foothills beyond.

Here we are approximately two miles above the ocean. Most pilots already know that line-of-sight radio signals only carry 70 to 80 miles, depending on the terrain, when flying one mile above the earth's surface. When flying two miles high, the line-of-sight distance does not double. In fact, it is less, because the earth's drop-off with distance is not a linear function, but rather an exponential one. For example, if the space shuttle were flying 100 miles high over the equator right now, we still could not establish line-of-sight radio contact, assuming we had the radio capability. Even if the shuttle's altitude were 4,000 miles high, about the radius of the earth, that wouldn't be high enough either.

At 1 PM Greenland time, with 250 nautical miles to Iceland, the seas are much rougher. Using binoculars, I can see that many of the white caps most definitely are capable of sinking a small vessel. It's not possible to tell how high the waves are, but I can tell by looking at them that the wind is out of the west. Our tail wind is 40 knots up here, so it must be blowing pretty hard down there, too.

When we are 150 miles from Reykjavik, I see what appears to be a snow-packed mountain at 11 o'clock out the cockpit window. Not only is it a very large mountain, but it's very high, as well, because it is poking through the cloud cover.

It is way cold in here today. Even with my fleece on again, I'm beginning to shiver a little. My cold fingers are making too many mistakes on the keyboard, and I might wear out the backspace key as I make all the corrections.

When I look out the left window and see the military markings and colors on the wing, I can't help but think about the job the military ferry command must have had in supplying the European troops with supplies and airplanes more than fifty years ago. Certainly, the trip we are making today was repeated thousands of times. The C-53s, such as the one we are flying, made this journey from the Douglas Corporation in California more than fifty years ago. It would be interesting if records existed that would reveal the names of those men in uniform who actually flew in a C-53, and who are still alive today. And those names of women, too, for they flew many of the WWII ferry missions, as well. I'm certain it would be a tear-jerker for them to learn that one of the old Gooney Birds is still alive and well, and will continue to exist for many years into the future -- safe and sound on the floors of a museum in The Netherlands.

For the last half hour or so, the right engine has been hesitating a little. To me it seems we might have an ignition problem on one of the cylinders. Maybe a spark plug has fouled, or the ignition wire to it is breaking down. Obviously, Wes is concerned, too, as he bolted to the cockpit just as soon as I noticed. Bob fiddles with the magneto switches, and Wes is looking out the window at the engine.

Eventually, it is discovered that the engine runs smoothly with only one magneto operational on the right engine. There are two on each engine for redundancy. Cars work just fine with only one source of spark, and airplane engines do, too. I must say, I experienced quite a jolt of adrenaline through all this. A little sedative (or maybe a double shot of whiskey) would be in order for me. No matter how well-prepared we are for a North Atlantic ditch, I'll never be ready to get wet in that cold water down there.

That mountain I mentioned earlier is almost off the left wing now, and I can feel that we are descending a little as well. The GPS indicates 60 miles to the inland airport, but the coast is probably only 40 nautical miles away. Also, we are on top of a solid layer of clouds, and the only thing now visible is the mountain to our left, which is poking through the over-cast sky.

After we are on the ground, the first thing that happens is Bjorgvin Bjorgvinsson, from Iceland Customs, comes aboard and wants to know how our flight was, among a few other things that he wants to know from Bob. Then Ari Kolbeinsson also welcomes us. He is from Flight Services, Ltd., an FBO.

Introduction
Day 1, Mesa, AZ to Salina, Kansas
Day 4, Stuck in Bangor, Maine
Day 7, Greenland to Iceland
Day 11, Iceland to Scotland

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