A blue ice runway is a runway constructed in Antarctic areas with no net annual snow accumulation, so that the resultant ice surface is capable of supporting aircraft landings using wheels instead of skis. They are intended to make transferring materials to research stations simpler, since wheeled aircraft can carry much heavier loads than ski-equipped aircraft.
Blue ice runways are created as a way of streamlining transport to the interior. Without them, most heavy materials must be brought by ship, then ferried inland by ski-equipped smaller aircraft. Large, wheeled aircraft can fly directly into the interior, saving time and money. In particular, they allow for rare medical evacuations to take place year round.
Because of ice's low coefficient of friction, planes tend to decelerate with reverse thrust, as opposed to traditional means of braking the wheels, and so runways are often several miles long.
Famous quotes containing the words blue and/or ice:
“True variety is in that plenitude of real and unexpected elements, in the branch charged with blue flowers thrusting itself, against all expectations, from the springtime hedge which seems already too full, while the purely formal imitation of variety ... is but void and uniformity, that is, that which is most opposed to variety....”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“I also heard the whooping of the ice in the pond, my great bed-fellow in that part of Concord, as if it were restless in its bed and would fain turn over, were troubled with flatulency and bad dreams; or I was waked by the cracking of the ground by the frost, as if some one had driven a team against my door, and in the morning would find a crack in the earth a quarter of a mile long and a third of an inch wide.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)