• U.S.

AERONAUTICS: Antarctic Wind

3 minute read
TIME

Commander Richard Evelyn Byrd sat sombrely in his snug Antarctic base last week, thinking of Laurence McKinley Gould, Harold J. June and Bernt Balchen, who the previous week had flown to the Rockefeller Mountains, 128 miles away. By radio they had reported their arrival there, then fallen silent for days.

As the Commander sat silently planning rescue, Reporter Russell Owen radioed sad conjectures to the New York Times.

After dog teams had started for the mountains, Commander Byrd with Malcolm Hanson and Dean Smith chanced a flight to what disaster they knew not. They found the first party miserable but safe in a wind-ripped, snow-clogged tent. A 150 m. p. h. gale had blown their heavy plane away together with their radio set.

Commander Byrd sent Flyer Smith back to the base with Balchen and June, and stayed in the mountains with Gould and Hanson. Two days later Flyer Smith returned with June and flew the three others back to the base camp.

Reporter Owen, who wrote himself into a state when an ice slide recently endangered the party (TIME, Feb. 11), this time abstained from hysterics and heroics. Perhaps having heard echoes of the way some of his romantic writings have been received in the U. S., he let Harold June dictate a first-hand account of almost incredible winds in the Rockefeller Mountains.

After the Gould trio had landed among the icy mountains, pegged down their plane and set up their tent, a fierce wind rose from the north. Their indicator showed it roaring 85 m. p. h. The wind grew stronger. The plane bobbed up and down against its stay ropes. Stronger the wind. Gould, holding a rope, “was blown straight out like a flag.” The men hugged the ice, dug knives into it to keep from blowing away. “The wind bellowed and shrieked at us. Pieces of snow, big lumps, began to hit us. They were pieces of packed snow from the mountain two miles away.”

Fiercer the wind. At 150 m.p.h. it sounded thin and high.* It sucked at the plane, whirled her backwards for half a mile. The three men, planeless, could only wait wet and miserable for rescue. It came.

* Hurricanes (typhoons sea cyclones) reach 150 m. p. h., tornadoes (land cyclones) 300 m. p. h. Conservative calculations estimate the force of a hurricane at more than 100 billion horsepower. The 1926 Miami hurricane is calculated to have had enough power to run every dynamo, motor and steam engine in the world for 20 years.

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