2015-01-13

Oddity seen on TV

Over the past few weeks, I've done a little bit of binge-watching of old TV shows.

On an old presentation of Top Gear, the team did a trip to the magnetic North Pole (or its 1996 location) in a special truck. The course they followed was roughly that of the biennial Polar Race.

The problems of traveling in such cold regions were many. Apparently, the Top Gear team was the first team to attempt to take a wheeled vehicle on that route.

The dog-sled was slower, but less hampered by the terrain.

The truck was severely hampered by thick fields of ice-boulders. Several times, I wondered whether they would have done better with a SnowTrac, or other tracked vehicle.

The thing which caught my eye the most was a downed airplane. The crew found what looked like a DC-3. James May correctly identified it as a C-47, since it bore the emblems of a military plane.

After some research, I found that the crash site was known. The crash was within a few miles of the (now-abandoned) Isachsen weather station. The airplane crashed during takeoff from the runway associated with the weather station. Most of the passengers on board the plane survived, and were rescued.

It was a surprising find.

I almost expected the show to contain a few jokes about Captain America. Then I realized that the Top Gear Polar Challenge had been filmed in 2007, and the film I was thinking of had been released in 2011.

I wonder if the sight of Arctic explorers happening on the scene of an airplane crash inspired any script-writers.