Hey, have you ever wanted to fly between Perth, Australia and Buenos Aires, Argentina nonstop?
Probably not, but it should make you mad to know that even if you did want to, you can’t.
That route would go almost directly over the south pole, and—with the exception of super
specialized sightseeing flights—there aren’t any commercial flights that us regulars can
go on that fly anywhere near the pole.
Why?
Well, there are a few reasons.
The first problem with flying over Antarctica is pretty intuitive: it’s cold.
Cold enough, in fact, that in March of 2001, the FAA put in place special rules governing
what are called “polar routes”—any plane or magical sleigh flying above 78 degrees
North or below 60 degrees South.
Now, I could just read the rules off of this really long PDF I found on the Boeing website,
but I don’t really feel like doing that, so I’m just going to play this old tape
I found instead.
Hello pilots, happy March of 2001, which is the year that it currently is and one that
will no doubt shape up great for the concept of airplanes.
Have you ever wanted to fly over “the poles?”
Well, it’s not poss—well, it’s as easy as 1, 2, 3… wait, there are more than three
ste—all you need to remember is one simple word: SCEMPT.
Yes, with SCEMPT, flying over the poles is a breeze.
Keen pilots may notice that the first letter of SCEMPT is “S,” which of course stands
for special training.
All pilots and crew manning polar flights must have special training for flying in arctic
conditions and maintaining equipment in the extreme cold.
Your crew must also have access to at least two cold-weather anti-exposure suits, for
unknown rea—because if you have to get out of the plane at an unexpected stop it might
be cold.
Before you chart your course, the FAA will need to sign off on a route of emergency alternate
airports for unexpected landings due to mechanical or medical issues, and plans to evacuate passengers
from each of those airports within 48 hours of landing.
During the flight, you’ll need to closely monitor your fuel temperature, because if
your fuel starts to drop below freezing temperature, you’ll need to change your altitude or just
give up and fly to Cancun.
Polar flights will also necessitate the use of charts with your true heading, rather than
traditional magnetic navigation.
That’s because the poles have an area of magnetic unreliability, due to the presence
of dark magi—due to science.
As long as you can remember to SCEMPT, your passengers will be spared a horrible, horrible
dea— Now, while these extra rules might disincentivize
a route over Antarctica, they wouldn’t necessarily prevent it—after all, commercial flights
regularly follow these rules up north.
Major routes like Dubai to Los Angeles, New York to Hong Kong, and New Delhi to San Francisco
all shave hours off their flight time by flying over the North Pole, either because Earth
is a sphere or because there’s a very generous time wizard hanging out somewhere in Greenland.
But if it’s not just the South Poles poley-ness, there must be another factor at play—and
that’s where our second problem comes in.
Basically, every commercial twin-engine plane is given a certain rating for how far it can
be, at any given time, from a suitable diversion airport.
This is to make sure that there’s always a runway that a flight can divert to in the
event of an emergency, like if one of your engines fails or you run out of those little
bags of peanuts.
This rating is called ETOPS, and it’s measured in flight-time—before 1985, all twin-engine
planes were ETOPS-60, meaning they could only ever fly within a 60 minute radius from an
airport.
Because of this restriction, flying over any major stretch of ocean had to be done by larger
three or four engine planes.
As planes got better, ETOPS numbers went up—nowadays, most common commercial planes like the Boeing
737 and the Airbus A320 can have a rating of up to ETOPS-180––that covers about
95% of the globe: pretty much everything… except for Antarctica.
To put things into perspective, the closest potential diversion airport to the South Pole
is the Ushuaia International Airport in Argentina, but it’s still about 2,500 miles, or 4,000
kilometers, away.
That’s like spraining your ankle in Manhattan and walking to Nicaragua to get it fixed…
assuming you can walk at 560 miles per hour in a straight line over the ocean, in which
case a sprained ankle probably isn’t that big of a problem… okay, look, it’s not
a great analogy, but the point is: the South Pole is far away.
Even the longest-range commercial aircraft in the world, the Airbus A350, caps out at
a rating of 370 minutes—leaving a fairly large chunk of the continent off-limits to
law-abiding pilots.
Despite all of these restrictions, an airline could, theoretically, route a flight over
part of Antarctica—they just need the right plane, the right equipment, and a specially-trained
crew.
At the end of the day, though, there just aren’t many routes over Antarctica that
make sense.
The vast majority of international flights already take place in the northern hemisphere,
since that’s the hemisphere with 90% of Earth’s population and 100% of Earth’s
M&M stores.
Now, some flights do come close to the Antarctic coast—like the routes between Sydney and
Johannesburg or Santiago—and depending on wind conditions they will sometimes fly over
a tiny bit of Antarctica, but absolutely zero go anywhere close to the pole itself.
Remember the theoretical route I brought up at the beginning of the video, from Perth
to Buenos Aires?
That’s pretty much the only one, and there just isn’t enough demand to warrant flying
it anyway.
But you know what there is demand for?
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