The Mission

CHAPTER 17

You’ll be glad to learn that I received my first commission as a professional photographer last week. After submitting a selection of my best photos to the station management, I was chosen from the on-site population, along with two other gifted photographers, to take part in the annual Aerial Photographic Survey Mission. They conduct the mission to record the condition and magnitude of drifting snow in proximity to all the buildings and storage berms here on station, along with providing general photos for construction and logistical planning, in addition to photos for promotional use by the National Science Foundation. Considering how strapped for cash the program seems to be (it must be, based on how comically minuscule my weekly wage is), I agreed to do this first assignment pro bono- I decided the prestige and honor of being involved with the mission were compensation enough.

The mission entailed two separate flights, 12 hours apart, to capture the scene with shadows lying in opposite directions. On each flight, we would make several passes of the station, at different altitudes and along different paths, to try to get a complete survey of the area. The plane was a small Twin Otter with a special glass window installed in one of the rear doors to allow clean crisp images to be taken from the relative comfort of the cabin. Unfortunately, as soon as we were air born and began our first flight, I leaned close to the window to start snapping away, and the glass instantly fogged over with ice from my breath. Inside the plane it was a balmy -20°F, not much warmer than the -35°F outside. With the special photo window iced up, and the other windows in the plane being made of old plexiglas, which were cloudy, dirty and scratched, the mission was quickly becoming a bust- but the co-pilot saw what was happening and came back to fix the situation…

To my surprise, he pulled out his Leatherman, opened a screwdriver bit, and began to unscrew the fasteners holding the glass window in place! He asked me to put my hand on the glass to hold it as he removed the last screw from the bottom of the frame, and then said in an unconcerned Canadian accent “So, I’m not quite sure what this window is going to want to do when you let go. It might fly open, or it might be sucked close, but whatever it does, just be careful, eh.”

Up until now, my only notion of open windows in flying planes came from bad action movies, where without fail, after an errant gunshot from a villainous hijacker breaks one of the airliner’s windows, a nearby screaming passenger is sucked bodily through the small opening. With a scene such as this running through my mind, you can understand my hesitation to take my hand from the now loose window. But the mission had to go on, so I bravely pulled my hand away, and… the window calmly fluttered open, buoyed by the force of the rushing wind, and suspended by a hinge at the top of the frame attached to the door. The co-pilot shrugged at me, and climbed back to the cockpit.

Now that the window was movable, we took turns shooting photos of the station with one person holding the window open fully, and the other thrusting their camera out into the freezing air to try and get some quick shots. We had to be quick, because flying at 90 knots, in -35°F, the wind-chill was somewhere close to -100°F. Not only did my fingers almost instantaneously feel the biting wind through my thick mittens like stabbing knifes, but the camera lens became sluggish to adjust, and my face alarmingly began to freeze to the back of the camera body when I held it close to see through the view finder. Considering these slight discomforts, we traded our position at the window often, and spent our turn holding the window open trying to regain feeling in our frozen hands. For all this, we came away with some great shots of the station, and a hell of an experience to remember.