​Longyearbyen, the main settlement on the arctic island of Svalbard, is not your average destination. Established by American John Munro Longyear in 1906 due to lucrative coal mining opportunities, the town today has 2.600 inhabitants, making it the worlds’ northernmost settlement with a population over 1.000 people.

Late Saturday evening on the 16th of March an Emergency Response Mission request from this remote Norwegian winter wonderland arrived at the Heavy Airlift Wing in Pápa, Hungary. The sole hospital on the island of Svalbard needed huge, heavy emergency power generators delivered immediately or lives could be at stake.

The Heavy Airlift Wing – which is the operational element of the Strategic Airlift Capability (which also includes NSPA and Boeing as essential parts) – assembled a crew, secured an aircraft and planned the whole mission already the following day.

First thing Monday morning a HAW crew of nine flew the SAC 02 (one of the jointly owned C-17 Globemaster III aircraft) to Gardermoen airport in Oslo, Norway, to load the first three out of six containers housing the generators and associated equipment.

Milestone landing

On Tuesday the first of two cargo loads arrived in Longyearbyen. The landing was historic in a sense for the Heavy Airlift Wing and the Strategic Airlift Capability program.

“We have been far north before, for example to Alaska, but this was our first landing in the Arctic“, says Heavy Airlift Squadron Commander LtCol Olav Andersen. “This mission marks a nice milestone for us.”

On Tuesday evening the SAC 02 and the same crew was airborne again, arriving back at Gardermoen. After an early Wednesday breakfast, the second batch of containers and equipment was loaded. In total, the transported cargo to Longyearbyen weighted nearly 70.000 kg. Normally a single C-17 can load up to 77,500 kg of cargo, but this time two delivery flights were needed due to the sheer size of the six containers.

Multinational crew

The Heavy Airlift Wing is a multinational organization in every sense of the word. This means for example that regardless of requestor or destination of a mission, the nationalities of the military staff carrying out the missions are always mixed. On this Svalbard mission the crew of nine represented four nations: Norway, Bulgaria, Netherlands and USA.

A Heavy Airlift Wing crew normally consists of pilots, loadmasters and a flying crew chief (technician). This time Aerial Port Technicians were also onboard as a special wheel set solution for the containers (‘Swedish Wheels’) were to be used to load and unload the containers.

On missions to more politically unstable, and/or possibly dangerous parts of the world, a specially trained HAW force protection unit will also be part of the crew.

One of the three pilots on this mission – Gert – is Norwegian and just came from another HAW mission which featured completely different circumstances.

“To fly in over the beautiful ice- and snow-covered landscape and touch down in Longyearbyen was a great experience.” he says. “We aid in missions all over the world, and the contrast to my recent mission in Africa is massive. The difference in temperature alone is 70 degrees centigrade, from 45 to minus 25”.