For the first time in history, an Airbus A340 has landed on a runway of Antarctic blue glacial ice. The company behind the landing of this airplane with a maximum take-off weight of 275 tons was Hi Fly, which specializes in chartering aircraft and crew for luxury expeditions.
This time its client was a company that organizes four-day expeditions to a luxury camp in Antarctica, a kind of ice safari. In fact, Wolfs Fang Airfield is a private airstrip established in Antarctica by White Desert Ltd.
This historic flight, HFM801/802, piloted by Captain Carlos Mirpuri, vice president of Hi Fly, left Cape Town for the frozen continent, a journey of 2,500 nautical miles (round trip) that required between five hours and five and a half hours each way. On board the first flight of the season were 23 passengers with most of the ground support equipment that is going to be needed by this company for its camp/safari (WFR, Wolf’s Fang Runway, Antarctica).
As the plane was already over the ice I could hear a round of applause from the cockpit. We were rejoicing. After all, we were making history
Captain Carlos Mirpuri, Vice President of Hi Fly
To ensure the quality of the track it is essential to check the friction reports, a task that was carried out with a properly equipped car that traveled the length of the track taking measurements every 500 meters. “The frictions were also all above what we consider minimum,” Mirpuri explained later. A business jet carrying scientists had landed on that same runway two days earlier.
“A blue glacial ice runway is hard and compact,” captain Mirpuri said. “It can withstand a heavy aircraft on top of it. Its depth is 1.4 km of air-free, hard ice. The next important thing is that the colder the better. The groove is carved along the runway with special equipment, and after cleaning and carving we get a proper braking coefficient; the runway is 3,000 meters long.”
The first recorded flight to Antarctica was in a Lockheed Vega 1 monoplane. Hubert Wilkins and Ben Eielson made the first exploratory flight over the Antarctic Peninsula on December 20, 1928, skirting it along the Weddell Sea coast. The project was financed by William Randolph Hearst, the wealthy American publishing magnate.
“The reflection is unbelievable,” Mirpuri added. “It’s also not easy to spot the track. There is no visual guidance of the glide slope, and the mixture of the runway with the surrounding terrain and the vast white desert all around makes altitude judgment a challenge, to say the least.”
There are between 40 and 50 airstrips in Antarctica, although there are no regular airports and flights as we understand in the rest of the planet. As Simple Flying states, from November 2019 to February 2020, a Titan Airways Boeing 767 operated a series of six flights between Cape Town and Novolazarevskaya, a Russian Antarctic research station.
In addition, in November of 2019, a Boeing 737 landed in Antarctica for the first time. The aircraft was operated by PrivatAir and chartered by the Norwegian Polar Institut. In any case, military aircraft and small turboprops remain the norm for the time being.
