Wrecked DC-3T restored and flown off Glacier

摘要

The Antarctic can be a brutally unforgiving landscape, and certainly not the place to perform a major airworthy restoration of a vintage aircraft, reports Richard Mallory Allnutt. But that is exactly what an intrepid recovery team has just accomplished on a Douglas DC-3T turboprop, C-GEAI, registered to Kenn Borek Air. The aircraft, nicknamed Lidia, clipped a snowdrift during take-off from the Holtanna Glacier in December 2012, and skipped back into the air. The resulting stall, and crash-landing, collapsed the undercarriage, which wrecked the propellers and engines, and dented the fuselage and wing skins. The cockpit received substantial structural damage.