A small plane with two sick U.S. workers arrived safely in Chile late Wednesday after leaving Antarctica in a daring rescue mission from a remote South Pole research station.

In a chaotic two days of flying, the rescue team flew 3,000 miles round-trip from the British station Rothera to pick up the workers in the U.S. Amundsen-Scott Station at the South Pole.

The mast it was tethered to still stands at Ny ?lesund, an old coal mining camp now an international research station, from where he made the first flight over the North Pole in 1926.