WELLINGTON, New Zealand -- A plane returned to New Zealand on Tuesday with four sick staffers and seven other Americans retrieved from a research station near Antarctica's coast the first of two perilous rescue missions to the bottom of the world.
A C130 Hercules landed on an ice runway at McMurdo Station on the last day of sunshine before the polar winter. To prevent freezing in the minus 22 temperatures, the engines were kept running for an hour while the evacuees were picked up. The overall flight took 15 hours before returning safely to Christchurch late in the day.
Hours later, officials hoped to launch a second, riskier mission 800 miles inland to the geographic South Pole to rescue a sick American doctor waiting for urgent treatment. Blowing snow, high winds and low visibility prevented an emergency airlift on Monday.
With little cloud and no wind, weather conditions were near ideal for the rescue mission at McMurdo.
"Everything went to plan, all the patients are now off the plane and safe," New Zealand air force spokesman Flt. Sgt. Darren Bentley said by telephone from Christchurch. "The guys put in a lot of effort and hard work for this mission."
John Sherve, New Zealand manager for U.S.-based Raytheon Polar Services., described the mass evacuation as "unprecedented."
He declined to comment on the patients' conditions, but New Zealand air force sources said one man had a serious heart condition that required urgent hospital treatment.
Others evacuees had "family emergencies they need to go take care of," Sherve said. All 11 are employees of Raytheon, which provides support services at the McMurdo Base.
There are 211 Americans left at the base following the evacuation, where they will spend the winter until the next flights, scheduled in late August, when Antarctica's spring begins. The evacuation flight carried fresh fruit and vegetables and personal mail to the ice-and-snow bound base staff.
In the separate rescue effort, Ronald S. Shemenski, at the Amundsen Scott-South Pole station, is the only physician among 50 researchers working there. He recently suffered a gall bladder attack and has been diagnosed with the potentially life-threatening condition known as pancreatitis.
An eight-seat, twin-engine plane fitted with skis for landing gear was scheduled to fly from the Rothera research station on the Antarctic peninsula to pick up the 59-year-old doctor. The plane arrived at Rothera last week from Punta Arenas, Chile, accompanied by a backup aircraft.
Flights to the South Pole station are normally halted from late February until November because of the extreme winter cold and darkness. But the rescuers worried that Shemenski's condition would worsen in the coming months, when an airlift out of the South Pole would be virtually impossible.
"The wind's blowing like hell. We're getting reduced visibility and blowing snow. If the winds calm down and there's less cloud cover, we'll get better visibility," said Steve Penikett, general manager of Kenn Borek Air Ltd., the Canadian airline company leading the evacuation for the doctor.
Aviation experts say a landing at the South Pole now is especially dangerous with temperatures now 75 degrees below zero 143 below with the wind chill and skies are nearly pitch-black some 20 hours of the day.
The rescue effort is the second in two years.
In October 1999, Dr. Jerri Nielsen, the lone physician at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station was evacuated after she discovered a breast tumor that was diagnosed as cancerous.
Antarctica is home to nearly 90 percent of the world's ice and 70 percent of the globe's fresh water. The third-largest continent, Antarctica is one and a half times the size of the United States.
Nations including the United States, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, France and Argentina carry out experiments at bases dotted across the continent. They are regularly serviced by flights during the summer months but batten down the hatches and reduce staffing for the polar winter.
McMurdo is a few miles from the coast and close to Mount Erebus, Antarctica's only active volcano, into which an Air New Zealand sightseeing plane plowed in 1979, killing all 257 people on board.
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