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The DC-8 we're preparing for Operation IceBridge this year.

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It's our third year in supporting this campaign. These are ice studies

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down in the Antarctic. We fly regularly about 11-hour missions

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and for the last three weeks we've been preparing the aircraft for this effort.

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So we're excited to get it going and we'll be leaving this Sunday on this trip.

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Typically a few weeks before the deployment,

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we start installing all the science instruments onto the aircraft

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here at Dryden, and then we need to test fly the aircraft before we deploy.

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And we have done this this week so we fly typically over

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known targets in the Mojave desert here and the

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Pacific Ocean and when we are comfortable that

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everything works as we expect, we are ready for deployment and then we

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will leave on Sunday for Punta Arenas in Chile.

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And of course there aren't any airfields down on the Antarctic

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continent that we could easily operate out of so we're operating out of

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southern Chile -- we're about as far south in South America as you can get

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and that gets us as close as you possibly can to the Antarctic. The DC-8 is

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well-suited for this kind of work because of the long legs it can fly.

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Operation IceBridge is the largest airborne campaign that has ever been

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flown of the polar ice sheets so far,

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and I'm really excited to be part of it because we fly six different airplanes

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this year -- three of them over the Arctic and three of them in the

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Antarctic and the DC-8 is the main workhorse

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for us to cover a lot of ground over the Antarctic Peninsula

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and the many glaciers that flow into the southern ocean.

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We are going back every year over the same glacier in Antarctica

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and measure with extreme precision how the surface