It is pretty bold when you think about that someone tried to bring an airplane to Antarctica all the way back in 1911:
Heritage carpenter Mark Farrell points to the spot where the pieces of plane were found. (Reuters: Pauline Askin)
An Antarctic expedition has found what it believes to be remains of the first aeroplane brought to the frozen continent, on an icy shore near where it was abandoned almost a century ago.
Australia has searched for many years for the old single-propeller Vickers plane at Cape Denison, where the nation’s most famous polar explorer, Douglas Mawson, abandoned it after it proved to be a failure during his 1911-14 expedition.
“Luck has been on our side and it’s been a great episode in the history of Antarctic aviation,” said Dr Tony Stewart, leader of the current expedition, after the chance discovery on New Year’s day.
Another member of the expedition, which is dedicated to restoring Mawson’s original wooden huts at Cape Denison, stumbled on pieces of rusted metal tubing among ice-encrusted rocks on the shore of Commonwealth Bay at an especially low tide. They match structural iron tubing from the single-winged plane’s fuselage.
Mawson’s dream of staging the first human flight over the Antarctic ice cap, less than a decade after the Wright brothers made the first powered flight, was shattered even before his expedition sailed for the Antarctic from Australia in late 1911.
The plane crashed in a demonstration flight in October that year, weeks before Mawson was due to set sail. No one was hurt, but the wings were damaged. With no time for repairs, Mawson removed the wings and took the rest of the plane, aiming to use it as a flightless “air tractor” to haul equipment across the ice.
Even as a tractor, with its wheels replaced by sled-runners, the Vickers was a failure. Its engine seized up in the cold. [Reuters]
