Therefore AWI decided to develop a special device, which can be carried by a helicopter (type BO-105) as outside payload to ice floes. The operation radius around the ship is up to 100 km. The only requirements are stable ice floes more than 0.5-m thick and some open leads around to lower the instrument. The latter saves drilling devices and thus space and weight during the air lift.

The latter saves drilling devices and thus space and weight during the air lift. The rack consists of a special lift-off frame, which combines two aluminum sledges, carrying the generator and the mobile winch. The whole system weighs 525 kg.

The instrument rack includes a CTD-probe, an altimeter, and up to two 5-liter bottles, which can be fixed to the cable and closed by a messenger. This allows for tracer sampling in the bottom layer.

The CTD probe is a Seabird 911 plus with double sensor pairs for temperature and salinity to achieve the same accuracies as the ship system.

After intensive flight tests in Bremerhaven, this equipment was first used successfully during the international drift experiment ISPOL (2004-2005) in the western Weddell Sea. Here, the outflow of very cold shelf waters from the Larsen ice shelf into the deep basin of the Weddell Sea was observed (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222531875_The_ISPOL_drift_experiment)