SINGAPORE - The first scheduled passenger flight to Antarctica landed yesterday. The Australia/Hobart to the Australian Casey Station will fly weekly transporting public and scientists to the base.

The first scheduled Australian passenger flight, Airbus A319, left the Australian city of Hobart the previous evening, destined for the newly built Wilkins ice runway, 70 kilometres from the Australian Antarctic Division’s Casey Station.

Video on Reuters.com

I like the air-stewardess announcement “15 mins to landing - please put on your survival suits.”…. yes there’s no nice warm airport terminal to step into here!

-Robin-

(Image Credit: Reuters video still.)

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Here’s some more of these flying maniacs in wingsuits, this guy is known as “The Dude” (full post coming tomorrow on landing without a parachute (thanks to reader tipoff). These videos are incredible. Absolutely incredible.

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Follow Tango & Cash the NI MTB Boys in their latest adventure, To Err-igal is Human.

The mighty Mount Errigal, County Donegal. Basically a big 750-metre-high wobbly peat trifle with granite crushed nuts on top. We always wanted to have a crack at it on/with the bikes, so we departed Antrim at 5:40am on Saturday 15 December 2007, to climb the mountain.

We knew it was a carry to the top, so we padded the top- and down-tubes with pipe lagging from B&Q. It’s a good idea if you are going to be carrying for a long period.

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MS “Beluga SkySails” is the worlds first tanker to be towed by kite. The kite is 160m sq.

Ship christening of the worldwide first cargo ship with SkySails-System took place at the Hamburger Landungsbrücken/Überseebrücke on December 15th, 2007 – Milestone regarding the use of environmentally sound propulsion technologies at sea.

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The Kandersteg Ice Climbing Festival starts tonight in Switzerland. Love that event. Above is one of my photos from 2004 when I watched Ines Papart win first place.

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How not to launch an RNLI lifeboat from the beach. The on-shore wind blew this English crew back onto the beach, for a minute it looks like they weren’t going to get away. Massive seas. Watch this video. (Thanks diverman).

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All climbing have a great video of Will Gadd ice climbing icebergs from waterlevel. Massive icebergs too! Iceberg-oldering anyone?

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Adventure Race World Series has been announced in Ireland for June 14-21 2008. Location is South West and more details are available from Jan 11th.

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-Robin-

LONDON, UK (Team Geared Up) - If a naked protest on a glacier wasn’t cold enough for you this week Go Blog links to a video of lads surfing waves crated by large collapses of ice from ice cliffs. McNamara and Kealii Mamala rode into surfing history last week when they towed into a monster tsunami created by Child’s Glacier in South-Central Alaska.

The creator/producer, Ryan Casey, “disovered” the wave in 1995, while on location shooting in Alaska. Then after finishing his last film, Quest, a documentary on big wave surfing, he showed Garrett the wave… that was six months ago. So after a short scout in June, we went up in August to film this

Crazy or cool? Cold anyway.

-Robin-

LONDON, UK (Team Geared Up) - TGU blogger Eoin arrives here in London in 14hrs time. Friday 1920hrs we fly to Turin, the location of the last Winter Olympics to hire a car and drive north. We’ll be laden down with ice axes, screws, crampons, ice-line rope, poles, winter boots, shed loads of gortex, fleece, softshell & ripstop. We’ve 8 nights in the Italian/Swiss Alps planned.

First stop is Gran Paradiso National Park to climb ‘Gran Paradiso‘ (above), the highest mountain wholly in Italy at 4061m. It should be a climb without difficulty if the weather is good to us. We’ll head up on the Saturday early enough to acclimatise over the day, and include a route recci for the low-light dawn start & some refreshers on glacial travel.

Next stop will be Castor (4226m) pictured above and Pollux (4092m), which Aoife & myself aborted in 2004 due to a week of bad weather in Zermat giving us only a window to complete Breithorn (4164m) safely. This year, we plan to complete both peaks in a single summit day, leaving the Sella hut in the early hours of the morning from the Italian side (rather than Swiss) and drop down to the col (joch) in between the peaks before ascending the other. We reckon the second peak will add an additional 2.5-3hrs to get back to first summit before descending.

This still leaves us with 3 free days to play with. We’re keen to open to the floor for some 4000er recommendations if any readers have any (You may have noticed, we’re climbing no more than PD routes on this trip).

In other news today, courtesy of Aisling we appear to have our 7th TGU Blogger soon to begin writing here. The only hint I can give right now is, they’re a very keen Irish mountain biker.

-Robin-

Image Credit: Top photo, Summit block of Gran Paradiso, Italy.