WITNESS - Flying in Antarctica - where's the runway?

Alister Doyle has been working for Reuters as a reporter for 26 years. Based in Oslo, he has been environment correspondent for three years after postings in Britain, the European Union, Central America, France and Norway. He is visiting Antarctica and in the following story he describes some hair-raising landings.

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

MERGER, Antarctica (Reuters) - When U.S. scientists last visited this Antarctic peak in 1975, they used dogsleds in a gruelling trip over crevasses. Now, pilot Steve King swoops down and coolly lands his plane on a snowy ridge at the top.

For me -- sitting beside King in the co-pilot's seat of the red Twin Otter plane -- the landing on the trackless, bumpy white surface in the Antarctic Peninsula is unforgettably terrifying.

"This is easy," shrugs King, a 52-year-old Canadian with 18 years experience of polar flying. "It's landing at the North Pole that's hard with sea ice." In one day, he made four landings on snow and ice.

Planes have transformed science in Antarctica by making some of the least accessible spots on the planet easier to get to -- at least when the weather is clear.

For first-time passengers it's nail-biting.

At Merger, a "nunatak" or rocky peak sticking out of the ice, the only evidence of a visit by U.S. scientists in 1975 is a tiny metal stake covered by a pile of rocks. They also oddly left a tin of butter -- whitish goo is visible through the rust.

King landed the red Twin Otter plane, which has skis alongside wheels -- on the slushy snow to within metres of where British scientist Alison Cook wanted to get satellite readings to update the maps compiled in 1975.