Where is the Antarctic Snow Cruiser now? (Q&A) 

can't wait in like 10 years time when the snow cruiser just appears on the chilean coast

When I saw mustard do a vid on it, I instantly remembered learning about it from you first.

I find it so strangely haunting thinking about that thing at the bottom of the freezing, black ocean. I'd imagine the temperature would keep it relatively well preserved. What a crazy discovery it would be if they found it again. Also, love the content - keep it up!

I literally just went down a deep dive wiki hole about this thing last week. I still think it’s incredible that they built this hot mess in just 11 weeks. I’ve seen my fair share of SEMA cars get pushed in cuz they couldn’t finish it in 6 months.

A fully funded expedition in search of this vehicle would be an incredible Interesting project.

Big difference with Kharkovchanka is while they got similar time frame for building, one is builded from ground up and other has to adapt proven design. And also, Kharkovchanka wasn't trully autonomous-they had limited, but vital logistic supply by air. For their threads' load and outside conditions, it needed constant maintenance.

I wonder how the snow cruiser would have gone if they had managed to get it away from the heavy and relatively warm snow of the coast and into the Antarctic interior.

Nice job on these documentaries! I've been fascinated by the Snow Cruiser since reading about it in old car magazines in the 1980s, and because of that I've been fascinated by all things Antarctica. Especially land transportation there. It's interesting that while it was a failure in the 1930s, the Snow Cruiser has helped keep discussions and research about that continent going for decades!

Seeing a plane being dragged around by Husky's is such a surreal thing to see

Thanks for this follow-up. Definitely one of the most interesting vehicles. Somewhat like a deep space spaceship...well, without space, but still. I aboslutely love this topic. And so far your video/s on this topic seem to be the best ones in production quality, detail and personality ^^

I wonder if the depth of the water and mass of the vehicle would allow it to be detected by a Magnetic Anomaly Detector from a sub hunting aircraft? Edit: it’s a long shot but a magnetic survey was undertaken by the USGS. I’m not sure if the instrumentation was sensitive enough for something like the snowcruiser to show up if someone went over the data with a fine toothed comb.

I am utterly intrigued about this vehicle and mission. I watched your video and another one that came out very close to each other

Thanks for the follow-up and for introducing us to such a fascinating piece of history!

It's so awesome the airplane meant for the cruiser survived and is still around is kind of heart warming. When it was seized for wartime use i almost thought it was going to be the end of it.

Its pretty interesting to see that you and other creators have basically shown millions of people this long forgotten piece of hardware. Thats just insane! Many thanks again for such informative video!

Thanks for the update Callum. Very interesting and well presented. Just picked myself up a FDC like yours

Thank you very much for the follow up video. I always enjoy your content.

Wonderful addition to that video and general Q&A.

Thanks for revisiting this. Fascinating stuff. Great great great presentation!!

Love the work and research you did. Excellent video.

ok i admit it .. the Snow Cruiser was the first video of Calums i saw .. but then i subscribed & have watched everything he's made .. & they have all been interesting

Fantastic follow up. Keep up the great work!

Yet another informative, interesting, and well researched video. Thank you!

I first saw reference to this years ago in a Clive Cussler novel. Thank you for sharing. Have a blessed day.

That's so awesome that the snow cruiser might be along the edge of the Ross ice shelf. I'll never forget sailing along side it and seeing it stretch to the horizon in both directions. So lucky to have been able to visit Antarctica, was my #1 dream when I joined the U.S. Coast Guard.

Wow how convenient i just watched the first video and now this video dropped, awesome!

Nice one Calum! Cool follow up. So good to see the Staggerwing made it through the years. Although it definitely had it's ups & downs! (Did you see what I did there? 😆) Cheers! 🥃

All is answered in the first 6 mins of this video. 11weeks to build it! Madness

New Calum, let's get into there.

'at the mountains of madness' always springs to mind.

Great video...👍

heya buddy, love your content... Keep up the good work

Enjoyed the video heaps mate. Maybe we need some more details on local whisky next...

12:31 - a thing that came to mind is motorsports, with rally racing on snow a larger wider wheel and tire doesn't do you any justice, you want narrow and studded so this appears to be a case of not being able to test ideas

Weight. ,we use go drive a geo metro in snow and on the jeep trails ..it worked really well

Had a pinto with a 351 cj c6 auto very out of control. Loved it.

That snow cruiser really reminds me of a huge aircraft tow vehicle. One of those big ones that have tank controls and crab crawling, beefy tires with no suspension or anything mechanically fancy. It both looks and essentially works the same way. They had very good reason to think it would work, considering that basic design could do so much more on every other surface and it's so mechanically easy to fix compared to something brand new, sorta why military uses that design to this day.

Mustard recently covered the Snow Cruiser. But Callum did it better.

I honestly think if they ever do find the snow cruiser they should restore it to its former glory!

Calum I replied to your FB Message regarding our Staggerwing restoration project.

I really hope they didn't abandon the Beech Staggerwing. That thing is super cool. I'm hoping one day I'll get to fly one

You made mention of the ice breaker Edisto as an army vessel. Ouch. It was U S Navy, then U S Coast Guard. This comment from a coastie. You present very good, informative vids on some now obscure bits of history. I look forward to showing these to a neighbor who worked Antarctica stations for Navy. The push to deploy the snow cruiser was a great, much publicized hurry-up-and-fail. Snow junket.

Good video:) Cheers mate:)

This is the first time I've seen Calum's face. I subscribed off the Snow cruiser video. He looks exactly how I imagined him

Your videos are weasome, i love your chanel

Great videos, I'm really enjoying them. I worked for a company called FMC in the 70's. One product they made was something similar to the snow cruiser and I only saw a photo and description. It looked about the same size as the snow cruiser and I only remember a couple things about it. It had giant wheels perhaps 6-10 feet in diameter but they were very low pressure 3-5 psi and they were designed for minimal damage to permafrost or the tundra. Part of the advertisement showed the giant vehicle rolling over a human being without injury. I remember seeing the photo. I've googled all over and can't find anything on this vehicle. Part of FMC was a division called ESD that eventually became an independent separate company. ESD was know for building one of a kind strange machines, such as the first automated postal sorter, a pepper picker, an automated system for assembling the 3 1/2 inch floppy disk, automated warehouses, coal mining machines and underwater living units. I worked on some very unusual coal mining machines which were called mobile roof supports.

Ah my question answered as promised 😁

I have been to McMurdo and had access to one of the National Science Foundation Ford vans with a 4X4 conversion and 44" tires (if I remember that correctly). The REALLY cool ones did in fact have four individual track assemblies, but the one I had could power itself around pretty well. You only really need to drive around on the hard-packed snow roads or the lava rock roads anyway, though, in the typical work on or around McMurdo Base. The snow cruiser was clearly underpowered and unsafe and completely unacceptable for going too far away from the base. The huge wheeled personnel carriers like "Ivan the Terrabus" usually work, but when snow drifts cover the roads, it needs to be parked on a huge metal chain link assembly and pulled by a huge Caterpillar loader. They call this "The Magic Carpet Ride". The McMurdo scientists havea sense of humor for everything. I have a picture of a pallet crate with professional-looking spray-painted stenciling that says "Fork Other Side"....when you walk around to the other side of the crate, the same stenciling now reads: "Spoon Other Side". The dorky scientists there are hilarious.

Keep in mind that the Soviets used tracked vehicles rather successfully in the Arctic. I blame Good Year for the tires as they surely wanted to promote rubber tires. Interestingly, the Soviets tried to learn from the American SnowCruiser and their first attempt also put the engine in an interior space on the premise that you would be sheltered while doing maintenance but because of that, the engines overheated, the interior cabin was too noisy and exhaust soot got everywhere in the living space. They also failed to have auxiliary heating and electrical power in their first version so when the engine wasn't running, they froze. The Soviets with their second version went back to the AT-T tracked trucks as a basis with the engine under a hood in front of the cab, both of which being separate from the interior space. They also included auxiliary heat and power with the second version though they could not benefit from that when maintaining the engine. (I'm surprised the Soviets didn't use one of their Strontium RTG's for auxiliary power). They could've just gone to multiple tracks to be long enough for large crevasses so crossing large crevasses wasn't a reason to not use tracks... I suppose we could say that the Soviets lucked out as they started with surplus tracked vehicles (the surplus AT-T trucks based on the T-54 tank) not purpose built Antarctic vehicles and found the tracks worked well so their purpose built vehicles used tracks whereas the US really had nothing to go on except that some of the financial contributors such as Good Year wanted tires. To be honest, I would've expected a lot of the supports to be skies with tracks for propulsion like a ski-doo. I believe the first Canadian patent for a "motor sleigh" was in 1915 and involved the familiar front skis and rear tracks. The Snowcruiser was 1937 so well after the suitable strategy was already known (at least known in Canada). The Soviet Karkochanka was in 1959 with versions used through 2010 so you could also say they probably learned from the US failure but really why didn't the US just learn from Canadian successes...

I had a sailplane instructor that was...ready...get ready...he was one of the Test Pilots on the Stagger Wing Beechcraft! Eddie was his name.

It is one of those things that beg the question " just because you can ? "

Please do a vid on the Beechcraft. Also :Talisker👍

Your channel is SO FUCKING GOOD!

2:53 Dig the alligator skin texture on the envelope. 🐊😆

Ten Years ago I took a trip round Scotland with the express purpose of going to as many distilleries as possible. Out of all the many single malts I tasted, Talisker was by far my least favourite. Just thought I'd drop that bombshell. :)

Very interesting. You're a natural at this, I'm surprised you don't have 100s of thousands of subscribers! The research you do alone puts most other YT channels to shame. Although, it has to be said that the Snow Cruiser was a badly designed vehicle, built in a rush by someone who refused to believe his ideas could be wrong, that then was so useless, it never really went anywhere, and was abandoned and forgotten. Rather ironically, from a British point of view, it bears horrible parallels with Scott's expedition! Whilst I appreciate how interesting all this is, it was basically a failure - and was always going to be. Soviet historians must be looking at all the fuss about this and thiking to themselves "but ours worked!".

I think about the beetle from another one of your video's that fell thru the Ice and sank. Someday somebody is gonna be scanning the bottom and come across this. WTH?? There is a VW parked there! [OK, your relieved of duty for Drinking on the job] 😅

I've not watched past the section that described it sinking in the snow unable to surmount that problem. Two improvements Keep the dual wheels but upgrade to eight huge rice paddy tires used in farming today with the equally huge 4-wheel drive tractors and add chains to provide more traction. Sorry just what iffing.

What the hell, i decided just yesterday to re-watch the previous Snow cruiser video.

Totally off-topic, but nice Nikonos and Pentax 6x7 in the background!

I wish someone would raise and restore the Caspian Sea Monster.

They look like tundra tyres, which kinda makes sense - till you take it to the Antarctic

I wish they would make a show on finding the land cruiser. Maybe exhibition unknown will make a show out of it.

Nice one Pal ;-)

Because of how long ago the machine was left in Antarctica, I believe it will look alot like a snow or ice hill matching the vechicle's dimensions. Kinda hard to find a white hill in the land of white hills too. Lol

Port Ruighe is legit as hell, nice

"So, how well does this thing do on ice and snow?" ~No one during the design and building process, apparently

great!

I love how your recommended videos included Tom Scott, Men, Mentor Pilot, and more

IF it wasn't abraded away/crushed by the chunk's movements, they will likely find it upside down at the bottom. Whilst the balloon tires wouldn't be enough to keep it afloat, it would be enough to force it heavy part down (assuming, they were still inflated). That means that it's likely crushed (much like other things that fell in such a manner, be they planes, boats).

Some very happy Old Ones have repurposed it into something like a big smokehouse for curing giant penguin meat.

If the Snow Cruiser is found if it’s a even able to be lifted ( it weighs 75k lbs) it would be absolutely priceless

Let’s go find it

Since the SC was built like a boat to keep the cold out if the tires were fully inflated would it float? I suspect it would. In that case it may not be on the bottom.

Interesting video. I have to admit that I often forget to take into an account the fact that tings obvious to us, were not so obvious years in the past. I now wonder if in the future there will be a guy watching youtube videos on space travel and comment something along" this is so obvious they should use...". Also, I guess I am lucky this video was on my to watch list. May I ask why did you unlist it?

There are historically very few staggewings here in New Zealand. Possibly 2 have been here in my lifetime and none that I know of before I was born

My grandma once showed me a picture it was of admiral bird standing beside the snow curser in byucrus Ohio ,if you would like I could get the photo to show u?

Late to comment but I wonder if the idea of underinflating the tires when stuck in soft snow was something they thought of back then? One of the images of the ASC on snow looked like one set of tires at the front were underinflated maybe? Or did Poulter and his team discuss that when the ASC got on solid ice (as often found in the middle of the Antartic) that the tires would need to be more fully inflated?

11:40 I've got a copy of the same book. :-)

I wonder if someone found a way to move it and use it for housing or shelter of some sort

I have hope that one day (as you say) while searching for something else they find what's left of the snow cruiser plenty of cases of ships being found entirely by accident as you mention with Terra nova, but another good example is the MV Dona Paz and MT Vector, which were found by a crew off the Philippines who were looking for WW2 Warship wrecksites and happened upon the spot where both ships had collided and sunk I do wonder what state the cruiser is in now days, if we are lucky it probably just sorta "fell out" in one piece but the more sad and likely case is it was well-stuck in the ice and each time it hit the wall it ripped more and more small pieces off, and all that's probably left is a bit of once red colored plating and maybe a wheel or two...shame really

Dirk Pitt found the Snow Cruiser... read Atlantis Found by Clive Cussler for an alternate ending to the Snow Cruiser's fate, you'll get a good laugh.

I'm just gonna say, if it so happens that an expedition gets started, and you happen to get invited for it, that better be fully documented on here xD

You’re video about the snow cruiser was in my Recommended list and I thought I’m going to watch it because it looks weird Well I like this video and last video about it. I wish I was rich so I could find it but I’m not rich, I live in Australia and I’m only 17

The Christie tank suspension system was rejected by the US govt so he sold it to the Soviets, then when American Officials saw it in use they realised they should use a similar system, This was around the same ERA

It is at the bottom of the ocean as the ice shelf it was sitting on has caved off. the ice then melted & it sank to the sea floor.

The yellow aircraft is a Boeing I'm 99% sure The Beach would have been used as a target tug...

Is there anything left of Little America 3?

Talisker whiskey made by the sea in Skye

Did anyone ask goodyear about those tires they provided🤔

Lets go get that thing. Pop the rubber off the bead, throw some screws through it and make a proper ice tyre. Bring some Tesla engines while we're at it, get this thing moving with some real authority. But the most crucial thing? Don't forget the whiskey! Calum, I here it's good over your way ;D

Wouldn't the mouse heavy tank and TOG 2 be a better comparison then the char b.

Never clicked on a video faster than this

I love how the airplane didn’t have wheels but the cruiser did. ;)

I suspect that a set of snow chains might have made a difference.

1. design a snowcruiser 2. build the snowcruiser with living suite and scientific gadgets 3. ship it to antarctrica 4. realize that slick tires dont work on snow while your snowcruiser is stuck after rolling off the ramp;

TOG II* is slightly shorter and slightly shorter in height but wider then the Char 2C tank. It's 10 tons heavier though at 80 logn tons. If I win the lottery which is unlikely because I don't buy lottery tickets I will fund your expedition.

Once failed did this thing saw use as a base structure?

It was just discovered. they don't know yet they found it but I am sure it is the Snow Cruiser.

Does anyone know were the model is ?