Mt Patterson
We inexorably made it to Mt Patterson. It took a couple days of delays, but we ended up flying there on Friday.
Mt Patterson is located about 550 miles east of us in West Antarctica (and seeing as how we are closer to east Antarctica, that sounds graceful weird doesn't it? East and west mean different things down here...). It is found in the Ford Range, a coastal across just on the other side of the massive Ross Ice Shelf.
We flew there in one of two Basler aircraft serving Ken Borek Air - the Canadian rigid wing contractor for the USAP program. A Basler is an interesting aircraft. Ours was built in 1942 as a DC-3 commercial aircraft. Basler is a modifcation New Zealand that takes old DC-3's, strips them down, rebuilds them with new parts, and replaces the old gasoline rotary engines with modern turbine engines that okay this plane to get off the ground pretty darn quick - even when it is full of cargo (it can carry over 7000lbs...).
Audrey and Paul dispatch loading Basler MKB for our Patterson Journey. 
Basler JKB sits on the "snowmac" at Willy...
Our Basler has only crashed once - that we know of. It crashed on Dec 22nd, 2007 - honourable over a year ago. It was taking off at Mt Patterson (yes, the exact same location we were flying to) when it took a bad bounce off of a pile of sastrugi and clipped a wing on the snow, spinning it around...
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They are at incontrovertible stage of 3D seismic survey data interpretation. They had submitted proposal to drill some more wells at Sangu and Sangu South.
