Students from the Rushcliffe Geography club entered a competition to design flags for Antarctica. Their flags have now been taken all the way to Antarctica and had photos taken with real scientists from the British Antarctic Survey- how exciting! Timothy Below took the photos, he is a Pilot at the British Antarctic Survey and has provided the following amazing details:
The pictures by the aircraft are in front of one of the British Antarctic Survey’s 4 DH6 “Twin Otter” aircraft, made by De Havilland. They were taken on the 29th of November, at a remote Antarctic location I landed at called Fossil Bluff, on the Antarctic Peninsula. There is no runway there, it is on the glacier, just snow, so the aircraft is fitted with skis as you can see in the picture, and we just land on the ice on them.
The pictures from inside the aircraft, which is one of the Twin Otters (registration VP-FBB), were taken from in flight in the cockpit. The aircraft is flying at 10 000 feet above the George VI Sound, on the Antarctic Peninsula, with the George VI glacier below us, with the snow/ice-covered mountains clearly visible through the flight deck windows.
The pictures with the icebergs in the background were taken at the Rothera Research Station, the central base of the British Antarctic Survey in Antarctica, here on the Antarctic Peninsula. There are about 150 people based here in the Antarctic summer (the UK winter, now), and about 25 during the Antarctic winter (our UK summer), so the Research Station is occupied all year round. Rothera is the closest arrival point in Antarctica to the land of the rest of the world, and the British Aircraft, as well as many other nations’ aircraft come through here using the runway here to enter Antarctica after a 4-5-hour flight from Chile in South America. The icebergs are in North Bay at Rothera, and if you look carefully, the children will be able to make out the Research Station runway reaching into the bay.
