Pegasus Field
former airstrip in Antarctica
Pegasus Field (ICAO: NZPG) was an airstrip in Antarctica, the southernmost of three airfields serving McMurdo Station. It closed due to excessive melting in the summer season caused by warmer temperatures combined with dust and dirt blown in from nearby Black Island. The last flight was on December 8, 2016 and it was replaced by Phoenix Airfield (ICAO: NZFX) with flights starting in February 2017.
Pegasus was originally conceived as a blue ice runway capable of handling wheeled aircraft year-round, but as it was developed, it was enhanced with a 4-inch layer of compacted snow on top—thus more properly characterizing it as a white ice runway.
Other local runways are the snow runways at Williams Field (ICAO: NZWD) that are limited to ski-equipped aircraft, and the former Ice Runway (ICAO: NZIR) on the sea-ice available during the summer Antarctic field season. The limitations of these additional fields meant that before Pegasus opened, jet-powered wheeled aircraft could only fly to/from McMurdo at the beginning of the summer season and all other flights had to be conducted using significantly smaller and slower ski planes.
The field is named after Pegasus, a C-121 Lockheed Constellation that made a forced landing on unprepared terrain in bad weather on October 8, 1970. None of the 80 on board were seriously injured. The aircraft remains in-situ near the airfield as of 2019, and has remained well preserved. It is generally covered with snow, but is occasionally excavated by visitors wishing to photograph it.
“Pegasus Field” enters the record as former airstrip in Antarctica. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Pegasus, Field and former can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3374224. Authority coordinates are -77.963, 166.525. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2016, 2017, 1970 and 2019.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pegasus Field” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.