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2.
A primary mission of the 516th Troop Carrier Wing is the airborne resupply of the DEW Line radar sites on the
interior Greenland ice cap. As an essential feature of operational
continuity in the support of this mission, this wing maintains a small
detachment of maintenance support and air crew personnel at Sondrestrom Air
Base, Greenland. From this far northern point, the ski-equipped C-130D
Hercules aircraft are launched on their life sustaining flights to
the isolated "Dye Sites". This detachment is manned on a rotating
basis from our available main- tenance skills and air crew resources at
Dyess. Tours of this duty normally run about three weeks in duration
and consist of enough main- tenance and supply personnel to adequately
support the four C-130 air- craft and aircrews positioned at Sondrestrom
during this particular season of the year. Normally only two C-130's are committed to
this operation year around with the exception of
the months of April, May and June.
During this period the normal aircraft and aircrew complement is doubled in order to take the fullest
advantage of the Arctic weather cycle.
While ideal flying weather seldom if ever prevails in the far north, relatively speaking, it is usually at
its best during this brief ninety day period. The surface shipping season lasts about six weeks - from the first of July to the middle of
April. Even then icebreakers usually have to be employed at the beginning
of this season to open the fiord leading from the ocean shipping lanes
to Sondrestrom. With both harbor facilities and time at a premium,
ocean freighters servicing the bulk requirements of this lonely bastion
have to be unloaded and cleared with all possible dispatch. Of all the heavy materiel and bulk
supplies brought-in once each year, POL products,
especially diesel fuel, are probably the most critical. They are the life-blood of both
Sondrestrom and the Dye Sites.
Without adequate POL supplies, they simply could not exist. |
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a. |
The Dye Sites themselves are equipped with 10,000
gallon col- |
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lapsible storage
tanks to hold their vital POL stores.
These huge cylin- drical rubber
bladders are buried in the ice and refilled once each year during the
April-May-June annual POL airlift from Sondrestrom. Each Dye Site possesses
sufficient tankage to allow for about an 18 month supply. The main supplies are stored in the
Sondrestrom tanks. Pro- fiting by
experience gained since establishment of the DEW Line, a re- supply cycle has
been generated to account for all of these diverse factors. The POL storage capacity at Sondrestrom is
not unlimited. Weather permitting,
every effort is made to resupply the Dye Sites from the Sondrestrom
tanks in April, May and June prior to arrival of the first surface
tanker. This procedure draws the
Sondrestrom tanks to levels which allow
surface tankers to pump their cargoes directly into them on
arrival. In this manner, the harbor
facilities are quickly cleared to allow
for the fullest utilization during the short summer shipping
season. This is a tightly geared
sequence of actions. Poor timing anywhere
within this chain could spell disaster to the vital defense posture
which the DEW Line provides North America.
In the final analysis, the
success of this annual operation lies largely at the mercy of the
unpredictable Arctic weather. The
only controllable |
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