Crash in Antarctica Kills Two

Abstract

A helicopter crash in Antarctica has claimed the lives of two people and injured three. Willem Polman, 45, a technician at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ), was killed on 2 March when a helicopter based on the research ship Polarstern crashed near the German Antarctic station Neumayer II. The German pilot, 37, was also killed. Three other passengers were injured, two of them seriously, according to the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) in Bremerhaven, Germany, which operates both the ship and the coastal Neumayer station. The ship is on a 10-week voyage to investigate the Southern Ocean as part of the International Polar Year. One of the injured is Dutch scientist Maarten Klunder, 27. Two others, a 24-year-old German helicopter technician and a 25-year-old female French researcher, were also injured. NIOZ announced the names of the two Dutch researchers, but AWI has declined to name the pilot and the other researchers, citing German privacy laws. The news of Polman's death “hit all of us like a bomb,” says Jan Boon, a NIOZ spokesperson. “We still have trouble believing it.” After the injured are evacuated, Polarstern is expected to continue its voyage, which is scheduled to end in Punta Arenas, Chile, on 16 April. The cause of the crash is unclear; the weather at the time was apparently good. AWI is working with the German Aviation Authority to investigate.