COVER N. 225 - FRANCE - Terres Australes et Antartiques Françaises - T.A.A.F.

Postmark: Dumont D'Urville - T. Adélie - T.A.A.F.  

Posted on the 28th November 2022; Received on the 24th March 2023

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Another totally unexpected landing from the deep South, with a nice stamp of a revamped Dakota.... boy, are those airframes immortal.....

Thank you so much Roman, as always your care and attention is always greatly appreciated.

This is the second cover I get from Terre Adélie and by now I should have received another one, as part of my Operation TAFF effort, but the cover that I mailed with a  view to getting it back after the round trip to the “banquise”, never made it back to me... probably some seal or penguin, trying to fill in the blank for Portugal in its private collection, found it first... 😀

The venerable Dakota, Douglas DC3, or C-47, has been around since 1935.  Under licence, it was also manufactured in the Soviet Union as the Lisunov Li-2 and Japan as the L2D2, total production of the type exceeding 16,000 units.

The interesting thing is that even today there remain upwards of 150 Dakotas still flying, what is a good indicator of the longevity and reliability of an aircraft which is now on the downwind leg of 90 years of flying history.

Acknowledging the sturdiness and reliability of the aircraft, Basler, an American specialist firm based at Oshkosh, started to revamp old but still airworthy airframes, by reinforcing, extending and re-motoring them with Pratt & Whitney Canada PT6 engines, thus creating the Basler BT-67, the subject of the stamp Roman used to make sure I would have a nice aviation themed cover from the TAFF in my collection.

The aircraft in the image is part of a fleet of 10 operated by Ken Borek Air, an air services provider specialising in polar operations (at both tops of the ellipsoid)  based at Calgary airport, in Canada, which I presume, is also instrumental in the operation of Concordia base, a joint French-Italian research station in Antartica, labeled by the ESA as the remotest base on Earth.

"Concordia research station in Antarctica is located on a plateau 3200 m above sea level. A place of extremes, temperatures can drop to –80°C in the winter, with a yearly average temperature of –50°C" (so says ESA).

Nice place for the outdoors loving ones amongst us, right?

The stamp on my cover is part of a souvenir sheet with two stamps, each one featuring a photo of  a Baseler BT-67 of Ken Borek Air (although  supporting different liveries), issued on  02JAN2021.

As usual with TAAF covers, further to the postmark, there are some other interesting stamp marks, one identifying the TAFF District - Terre Adélie -  and the other with the coordinates for the Dumon D'Urville base, where the mail is processed.