The air-tractor sledge was a converted fixed-wing aircraft taken on the 1911–1914 Australasian Antarctic Expedition. Expedition leader Douglas Mawson had planned to use the Vickers R. E. P. Type Monoplane as a reconnaissance and search and rescue tool. The aircraft crashed heavily during a test flight in Adelaide, only two months before Mawson’s scheduled departure date. It is hoped that the plane will be recovered in the next few years, if not before the end of the current Antarctic season in November 2015.
About Air-tractor sledge in brief
The air-tractor sledge was a converted fixed-wing aircraft taken on the 1911–1914 Australasian Antarctic Expedition. Expedition leader Douglas Mawson had planned to use the Vickers R. E. P. Type Monoplane as a reconnaissance and search and rescue tool. The aircraft crashed heavily during a test flight in Adelaide, only two months before Mawson’s scheduled departure date. The plane was nevertheless sent south with the expedition, after having been stripped of its wings and metal sheathing from the fuselage. The freezing conditions resulted in the jamming of the engine’s pistons after just 10 miles, and the air- tractor was left behind. In 2008, a team from the Mawson’s Huts Foundation began searching for the remains of the air tractor. A seat was found in 2009, and fragments of the tail assembly a year later. Results indicate that the airractor, or parts of it, is still buried under three metres of ice where it was abandoned at Cape Denison. The Mawson Huts foundation has undertaken extensive investigation using sophisticated equipment in 2009 and 2010 to try and find out what happened to the plane. It is hoped that the plane will be recovered in the next few years, if not before the end of the current Antarctic season in November 2015. It was the first plane to be taken to the Antarctic, and the only one of eight built by the British manufacturer Vickers Limited. It had a maximum range of 300 miles at a cruising speed of 48 knots.
Its wingspan was 47 feet and its length was 36 feet. It was fitted with a joystick for pitch and roll, and a lateral control for lateral control by the pilot, with a five-cylinder Vinder R E P P engine developing 60 horsepower. The air tractor was used to tow a train of four sledges, and its frame was left on the ice when the expedition returned home in 1913. Its use during the expedition was minimal, but it was used in laying depots for the summer sledging parties, but its use was not widely known. It remains the only plane to have been used on the Antarctic continent, and one of only a handful of planes to have ever been used for reconnaissance and rescue missions on the continent. It has been described as the most advanced plane in the world at the time of its departure. It also had the most powerful engine of its type, and was the only aircraft to be used in a rescue mission on the South Pole in the 1930s and 1940s. The Vickers aircraft were the first to be built in Britain designed by the Frenchman Robert Esnault-Pelterie, and were the only ones to be sold in the UK. The only other plane built was a Blériot, which was designed by a Frenchman, and had a range of 48 feet and a maximum speed of 36 feet. The Sledge was the last plane of its kind to be flown on an Antarctic expedition, and it is believed to still be in existence.
You want to know more about Air-tractor sledge?
This page is based on the article Air-tractor sledge published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 07, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
