**6. Conclusions**

In 2015, for the first time, China deployed its fixed-wing aircraft in Antarctica, which has led to substantial scientific and logistical achievements. An airborne IPR, a gravimeter, a magnetometer, a laser altimeter and a camera were simultaneously configured and integrated onto the aircraft at the same time. The airborne scientific platform has been applied to investigate many critical areas in East Antarctica in the past five austral seasons. Until now, over 175,000 line km of data have been surveyed in East Antarctica, not only filling the largest remaining data gap but also covering surrounding areas such as the Amery Ice Shelf, the West Ice shelf, Ridge B and the Titan Dome. Successful scientific operations of Snow Eagle 601 in the past five years prove the reliability and capability of the airborne platform and aviation support for airborne surveys in Antarctica.

Nationally, extensive collaboration with universities and institutes should be strengthened and deepened to carry out data interpretation and scientific research. Internationally, we have established close collaborations with the University of Texas at Austin, Imperial College London, the Australian Antarctic Division, the French Polar Institute Paul-Émile Victor and the Korea Polar Research Institute under the ICECAP framework. In the coming years, we will continue to survey the interior of the Antarctic Ice Sheet where flight lines are still sparse and launch new campaigns to survey the Ross and Amundsen Sea sectors as well as the transition zones between the continent and ocean. The resulting data will continue to contribute to international compilation e fforts including the Bedmap, ADMAP and AntGG databases while improving our understanding of the ice sheet and subglacial geology of the Antarctic continent.

**Author Contributions:** Writing original draft, X.C.; X.Z. and S.L.; methodology and software, J.S.G.; S.L. and X.C.; investigation, J.S.G.; X.C.; J.G. and L.L.; supervision, B.S.; review and editing, all authors. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41941006, 41730102, 41776186), the National Key R&D Program of China (2019YFC1509102, 2018YFB1307504), the G. Unger Vetlesen Foundation, NSF grants PLR-1543452 and PLR-1443690, the Department for Business Innovation and Skills, the British Council and the US State Department.

**Acknowledgments:** We thank the Chinese Antarctic expedition teams and Kenn Borek Air Ltd. aircraft crew for their support of aviation operations as well as Laura Lindzey, Gregory Ng, Feras Habbal, Wei and other ICECAP/PEL members for their contributions to scientific operations of Snow Eagle 601. We also thank the reviewers for their constructive and helpful comments and suggestions for improving the quality of our manuscript. This is UTIG contribution #3690.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.
