Page 100 - Australian Defence Magazine November 2021

100 AIRPOWER
NOVEMBER 2021 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
AN AIRDROP LIKE NO OTHER
In late August, after months and months
of planning, an RAAF C-17A Globemaster undertook a 15-hour round trip to airdrop supplies to Mawson Station in Antarctica, which had been isolated from maritime resupply due to thick sea ice last year.
EWEN LEVICK | MELBOURNE
THE mission was an impressive whole-of-government effort to plan, coordinate and execute. The RAAF effort (under Operation Southern Discovery, the ADF’s Antarctic sup- port operation) was led by Flight Lieutenant Matthew Hu- ber, a C-17A pilot with No. 36 Squadron, who told ADM that planning started up to a year ahead of time in order to grapple with multiple challenges.
“Planning was conducted about six to twelve months prior,” FLTLT Huber said. “There was engagement be- tween multiple government agencies such as the ADF
“BIOSECURITY WAS A BIG CHALLENGE, INCLUDING COVID, WHICH IMPACTED HOW WE WERE GOING TO COORDINATE THE EFFECT WITH ALL THE AGENCIES INVOLVED”
and Australian Antarctic Division (AAD), as well as environmental, meteorological, and logistics consid- erations that all needed coordination to get the job done.
“Biosecurity was a big challenge, including COVID, which impacted how we were going to coordinate the effect with all the agencies involved. We went forward from there to plan a mission that would depart from Perth International Airport and conduct the 15-hour sortie.”
scale of the operation was less of a concern than the un- predictability of Antarctic weather.
“We very rarely, I would say, enact a mission that is an actual 15.2-hour sortie requiring an 80,000-pound upload of fuel using air-to-air refuelling capabilities, although we train to it,” FLTLT Huber said. “That wasn’t really a huge issue for us. The biggest complexity was understand- ing the weather at that time of the year and the daylight hours. Being flexible and resilient to the changing weather patterns is probably the most critical point of doing any Antarctic mission, whether that be landing or airdrop.
“There are flexible and rapidly changing weather sys- tems that move through Antarctica, which can change ev- ery 6-12 hours, so there was a very small window for the drop – and meteorological forecasting models all like to tell us different stories.”
For the RAAF and the AAD, the main meteorological concern was the strength of the prevailing wind, which
In a release, Defence said that biocontrol measures in- cluded washing parachutes to prevent unwanted organ- isms from entering Antarctica, which was undertaken by 176 Air Dispatch Squadron in Tasmania after a mandatory two weeks of quarantine.
Meanwhile, the RAAF had to provide guidance to the AAD on how to develop a drop zone to military requirements. “The planning crew, which was myself and a few other pilots, we coordinated with the AAD to develop the drop zone that we needed to execute the mission,” FLTLT Hu- ber said. “Obviously they’re not a military agency, so we provided the guidance on how to lay out the drop zone and they did the work on the ground down there to ensure that
it met the minimum requirements.”
For FLTLT Huber and the crew aboard the C-17A, the