At left, one of the #2 engine propeller blades that punctured the fuselage. And at right, a view of the end of that propeller blade INSIDE the fuselage. This was crew member Tom Gregg's seat. He was standing back by the left rear door watching the JATO bottles go off in more ways than one...the prop blade cut his movie camera in half. The right photo is probably by Frenchman Pierre Laffont (and provided by Jim Mathews). The photo at left is from Lennie Bourgeois, a VXE-6 QA guy who went in on the rescue flight. Below, a few more of Lennie's pictures taken during the rescue and recovery mission:

Since they had just gotten airborne, the sudden loss of power from engines 1 and 2, with engines 3 and 4 still at maximum power, caused the plane to yaw hard left with the right wing coming up rapidly. Ed rolled the aileron full right wing down, applied full right rudder, and closed the throttles. He managed to get the plane straight and level just prior to the impact (which collapsed the nose ski). He resisted any urge to power the plane out of the problem, otherwise they would have struck the snow in an extremely left wing down attitude and the aircraft would have cartwheeled itself to pieces, with loss of life. The pilot was awarded an Air Medal for his amazing presence of mind. The photo at right (Ralph Lewis) taken just after the crash shows the JATO mounts on the left side of the aircraft, with the burn marks from the bottles that broke free.

On 4 December 1971, the LC-130 aircraft Juliet Delta 321, piloted by LCDR Ed Gabriel, was damaged during takeoff from this site ("D59") 125 miles south of the French station Dumont d'Urville and about 850 miles from McMurdo Station. It had just completed the second of five supply flights to the French Carrefour traverse party, part of a U.S./French glaciology project. The traverse was on its way to the Soviet station Vostok from Dumont d'Urville. After an uneventful open field landing and resupply, during the takeoff at an altitude of about 50 feet, two JATO bottles (165-pound solid-fuel rocket bottles used for "Jet Assisted Take Off" from soft open-field landing sites) broke loose from their attachment points on the left rear fuselage. One went up the tailpipe of the #2 (inboard left side) engine; the other struck the #2 propeller. The propeller went to pieces, and some of the flying debris took out the #1 engine and propeller, with several large pieces entering the cargo compartment. Above left is a photo from Ralph Lewis taken during the rescue; above right is a U. S. Navy photo taken just after the crash (AJ 9/79; when this photo was published there had been plans to recover the aircraft during the 1980-81 season).