To Antarctica aboard an Airbus A340

My flight has been moved up. Takeoff is now twelve hours before the scheduled departure time—early morning instead of early evening. Such a change would be unthinkable for scheduled flights, but flight 3L 801 from Cape Town to Wolf’s Fang is anything but a normal scheduled flight: it’s the world’s first scheduled service to Antarctica with a large passenger aircraft. The only thing that matters here is the weather. And today, given the satellite images and data from weather stations at the bottom of the world, that flight will be departing earlier. Anyone traveling to the southern polar region needs to be flexible.

As the sun rises behind Table Mountain, we board an Airbus A340-313X, a version with increased takeoff weight, built in 1997. Two Greek pilots and a first officer from Portugal sit in the cockpit. Portugal is also home to the flight operator, the charter company Hi Fly. “Together with tour operator White Desert, we’ve spent the last three years developing all the procedures for this unique route,” pilot Adam Latsos explains to me.

15th landing on the Antarctic runway

This is the fifteenth time Latsos has flown south from Cape Town in midsummer to the Wolf’s Fang runway, 4,200 kilometers away. In November 2021, Hi Fly’s Airbus A340 became the first four-engine, commercial widebody aircraft ever to land in Antarctica. Other operators had already undertaken individual A320 flights and missions with Boeing 737s, 757s, and 767s to supply research stations. In November 2023, a Norwegian Boeing 787 landed in Antarctica for the first time to supply the Troll research station. However, only Hi Fly offers a regular service with a long-haul aircraft: the company’s A340 flies around 15 times over the season, which runs from November to February.

Aircraft have been operating on Earth’s highest, windiest, coldest, and loneliest continent for less than a hundred years. In 1911, the Norwegian Roald Amundsen became the first person to reach the South Pole, but it wasn’t until 1929 that an aircraft flew over the globe’s southernmost point. Much progress has clearly been made since then, because without aircraft, scientific activity in the southern polar region would be impossible. Within Antarctica, flights are carried out using smaller turboprop aircraft. But a regular connection to civilization with a four-engine widebody aircraft has ushered in a new era.

In the cockpit, Captain Latsos shows me our route on a tablet. The blue line heads directly south; the eleventh waypoint is the destination. Wolf’s Fang is the only private runway in Antarctica. It’s run by the tour operator White Desert, which uses smaller aircraft to transport some 220 tourists to two camps and around 250 scientific station staff to their workplaces from here each season. “Every flight is different. Even if the weather’s good, there’s no routine. But I know exactly what I’m doing,” the captain assures me.

He filled up with 86 metric tons of kerosene—a good 10 tons less than the tanks can hold, but considerably more than we need for the outward and return flight plus safety reserve. Some kerosene is always pumped out at the destination, so in a way, the A340 also acts as a flying tanker that supplies the stations with fuel. Shortly before seven a.m., I take a seat behind the first officer and we taxi onto the runway. “Moonraker 801, you’re cleared for takeoff,” I hear in the headsets; Hi Fly uses a radio call sign based on the eponymous 1979 James Bond film.

Full cargo hold, almost empty cabin

With a takeoff weight of a good 226 metric tons, the aircraft is still around 50 metric tons below the maximum. The cargo hold is full of food and equipment, while the cabin is occupied by just 54 passengers—guests, staff, and Antarctic personnel—and 14 flight crew members. After climbing for a few minutes, we can see the lights on the Cape of Good Hope below us. After that, nothing but ocean. For me, it’s time to have breakfast in the cabin and enjoy the flight. I’m back in the cockpit an hour before landing, just in time to see the first icebergs floating in the blue water below. The temperature is already being turned down in the cabin. “Please put on your polar gear now,” says a flight attendant. I’m already wearing the first layer of ski clothing.

Here, so far south, the pilots are largely on their own. Latsos says: “There’s no other air traffic down here, so in a certain area we’re even allowed to choose our own altitude.” A printer situated between the two pilots spits out weather reports: decreasing snowfall and sufficient surface friction for braking on the icy runway. For the aircraft to be able to land at all, the temperature must be no warmer than −6 degrees Celsius, as the surface becomes too soft at higher temperatures.

Landing in Antarctica: Pure manual expertise

The most difficult part of the flight is the landing, because in addition to the temperature, the visibility must be right as well. “There aren’t any radio navigation aids from the ground, so we fly according to visual flight rules. Pilots aren’t used to this anymore, as large jets usually make their approaches using instruments. Here we have to make our final approach manually,” Latsos explains. Half an hour before landing, the cockpit makes initial radio contact with the station in Wolf’s Fang and reports the time remaining until landing. “They don’t have radar and can’t see us, plus we need the latest weather update,” Latsos informs me. That report looks just about good enough, because the cloud base is 4,800 feet (approx. 1,460 meters) above ground. “The absolute minimum for a landing would be 4,000 feet,” the captain says.

With thirty minutes’ flight time remaining, he begins the descent, and I become increasingly tense. Pretty much as predicted, we break through the cloud cover at 4,800 feet. Below, everything is gray-white except the mountain range ahead of us, giving us an all-important view of the horizon for orientation. I’m a little disappointed, as I’d hoped for a bright polar day. However, the weather forecast had predicted only medium to low contrast, and the untrained eye has trouble spotting anything at all on the ground, let alone the runway. “Landing here is a question of experience, because reflections from the ice make the radio altimeter unreliable,” Latsos says. “If you can’t see the runway, you don’t go into the final approach.”

Runway on glacial ice

I peered at the ground in vain, while the pilots’ trained eyes spotted the runway 15 miles before touchdown. It has no lighting, just a few small flags to serve as markers. The white of the cleared runway barely stands out from the surrounding snow. A fleet of snow groomers, like those used at ski resorts, needs at least four days to prepare the three-kilometer-long runway, consisting of around 700 meters of thick glacier ice, for a single landing. Ten miles before touchdown, the final approach begins. Only now do I recognize the landing site and the camp, a few large tents in the white nothingness.

Exactly five hours and 17 minutes after takeoff in midsummer, we land on the Antarctic ice in Wolf’s Fang, south of the 71st parallel and still 2,064 kilometers away from the South Pole. The huge jet stutters a bit as it taxis to a stop; the natural ice track is not as smooth as concrete, despite all the care taken. “But you can brake surprisingly well here. It’s comparable to a wet runway elsewhere,” Latsos says. At the end of the runway, which he only uses half of, we make a 180-degree turn. It’s sometimes a bit slippery when making such turns, but today there’s no problem.

It takes us almost ten minutes to taxi back to the start of the runway at walking pace. “Today was the first time I managed to touch down exactly where I was supposed to!” Latsos says happily. Then he turns off the engines, except for engine number one and the auxiliary power unit. Both remain switched on and running while the aircraft is on the ground for the next four and a half hours, making it easier to start up the others again later. Better safe than sorry.