Malcolm Schongalla, an emergency room physician who lives in Utah, has an interesting second job — flying big LC-130 cargo aircraft outfitted with skis in support of the U.S. science mission in Antarctica.

The pilot’s New York Air National Guard unit, the 109th Airlift Wing, is transiting back home from its October-to-March mission — now in its 30th year — flying from McMurdo Station in Antarctica to New Zealand, American Samoa, Hawaii, the West Coast and, finally, New York.

More than 30 crew members stopped in Hawaii this week in about a half-dozen orange-tailed LC-130s with a massive 800-pound ski attached to the nose wheel and 1-ton skis on the rear wheels.

A hydraulic system allows the skis to be raised and lowered for snow or asphalt. Schongalla, who has the rank of major and is an aircraft commander, said the unit has the only ski-equipped C-130 Hercules in the world.

Landing on snow “can be a bit of a gliding feeling” without a bounce, Schongalla said on the Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam flight line Wednesday. “I’d say it’s smooth — especially if the snow is deep and powdery.”

The unit flies the “Operation Deep Freeze” missions during the Antarctic summer and transports personnel, fuel and other supplies between about a dozen camps for the National Science Foundation.

The temperature recently was 40 below zero at the South Pole, he said. The planes have extra hot-air plumbing to keep the deep freeze at bay.

Not many people get to see Antarctica — which is about the size of the United States and Mexico combined — and Schongalla, who has made the trip almost every year since 2005, remembers the first time he flew to the South Pole.

When he took off, it was one of his first views he had of McMurdo Station and the surrounding mountains from the sky.

“And it’s absolutely stunning,” he said. “You’ve got mountains that climb over 13,000 feet coming straight out of the sea, and you can see Mount Erebus, which is an active volcano that’s still smoking.”

Eventually, the flight passes over the Transantarctic Mountains and “they feel like they are going to touch the plane, they are so big,” he said.

Following that is the Antarctic Plateau, which Schongalla said has ice 2 kilo­­-meters (about 1.2 miles) thick, “and it’s just flat and barren until you get to see the South Pole Station sticking up all by itself in the middle of a blank sheet of nothingness.”

Schongalla said he’s taking some time off from his civilian career to support Operation Deep Freeze. He went on military orders in January and also worked as a contract pilot in Antarctica in November and December.

He steered clear of climate change, but said “our scientists are very interested in going to places like Pine Island Glacier, Roosevelt Island and some of the ice streams to measure the changing rates of ice movement out there.”

NASA reported in mid-July that an iceberg about the size of Delaware had split off Antarctica’s Larsen C ice shelf days earlier.

Dan McGrath, a glaciologist at Colorado State University, was quoted by the space agency as saying the Antarctic Peninsula has been one of the fastest-warming places on the planet through the latter half of the 20th century.

“This warming has driven really profound environmental changes, including the collapse of Larsen A and B (ice shelves),” McGrath said.

Schongalla has seen physical changes over the years — but that’s because Antarctica is ever changing. The LC-130s land on Williams Field, where the ice is 300 feet thick.

“Every so many years we need to move the airfield because it’s on an ice shelf that’s constantly moving toward the ocean,” he said. “And every year a little bit more of it melts off into the ocean. So there’s talk in the next few years of relocating Williams Field to a new spot because it’s starting to get close to the ocean.”