It was great to be able to go up into the pilots' cabin. It reminded me of a time in which we could do this in any commercial plane. I had been thinking about this moment since I read on the New York Times back on September (Polar Sidekicks Earn a Spot on the Map, published September 28, 2010) that the international community had decided to change the name of flight reference points en route to McMurdo Station in celebration of the centennial discovery of the South Pole.
I remember finding the article pretty interesting, but I might have forgotten about its details if I had not know at that time that today I would be flying on a C-17 through all those points. Here is a picture of an old chart attached to one of the few vertical walls on the plane. This one does not reflect the recent changes
Old flight chart on one of the vertical walls of the plane.
Here is an extract of the NY Times about the names:
'Helge, Mylius and Uroa (Greenland dogs of Amundsen’s) and Jimmy Pigg, Bones and Nobby (Scott’s Manchurian and Siberian ponies). Several of the animals’ names have been modified to conform to the standard five-letter format for the waypoints, where at intervals of a few hundred miles pilots must report by radio to air traffic controllers their time of arrival, position and weather conditions.
On the new map, for example, Helge’s name appears in full, but Uroa’s becomes Urroa, and Jimmy Pigg is conflated to Jipig. Previously, waypoint names were just a set of letters generated by computers, meaning nothing. An exception, the next to last waypoint near the Antarctic coast, will continue to be designated Byrrd, for Adm. Richard E. Byrd, one of the most famous American explorers of the continent.''
So even before I asked for the opportunity to go up to the cabin (I should have said that the cabin is at an upper level from the cargo, aka us) I knew what I was going to ask about. Sure enough, the third pilot pulled out the updated chart and showed it to me
New chart showing the reference points named after the dogs used by Amundsen and the ponies used by Scott in their race to the South Pole.
Detail of the new flight chart in which the reference points of the flight between Christchuch and McMurdo have been changed to honor the dogs used by Amundsen and the ponies used by Scott in their race to the South Pole.
Pretty cool, if you ask me!