An Airbus A340 plane lands for the first time in Antarctica

(CNN) – For the first time in history, an Airbus A340 aircraft landed on the Antarctica.
Hi Fly, a boutique aviation company, was in charge of the flight. The company specializes in crewed aircraft leasing, which means that it rents both the aircraft and the crew, and takes care of insurance, maintenance, and other logistics.

The Hi Fly 801 took off from Cape Town, South Africa on Tuesday, November 2.

The plane was commissioned by Wolf’s Fang, a new luxury adventure camp on the world’s southernmost continent, and brought the necessary supplies to the complex. Wolf’s Fang is a new project of the high-end Antarctic tourism company White desert.

The crew of the Hi Fly 801 (and its return trip to Cape Town, the Hi Fly 802) was led by Captain Carlos Mirpuri, who is also Vice President of Hi Fly.

Each flight lasted between five and five and a half hours, and the team spent less than three hours on the ground in Antarctica, traveling 2,500 nautical miles.

Wolf’s Fang’s blue ice rink is designated a level C airport, despite not being technically an airport. That means only highly specialized crews can fly there due to the very difficult conditions.

“The colder it is, the better,” Mipuri explained in his logbook.

“The grooves are carved along the runway with special equipment, and after cleaning and carving them we achieve a suitable braking coefficient; as the runway is 3,000 meters long, landing and stopping such a heavy A340 at that aerodrome would not be a problem”.

Although blue ice is beautiful, it can also be worrisome to pilots because of its glare.

Mipuri added: “The glare is tremendous, and proper goggles help you adjust your eyes between the outside sight and the instrumentation. The non-flying pilot plays an important role in making the usual and additional warnings, especially in the last stages of arrival.

The Hi Fly 801 approaches the ice rink.
Credit: Marc Bow / Hi Fly

The first recorded flight to Antarctica was a Lockheed Vega 1 monoplane in 1928, piloted by George Hubert Wilkins, an Australian military pilot and explorer. It took off from Deception Island in the South Shetland Islands. The project was funded by William Randolph Hearst, the wealthy American publishing mogul.

Thanks to these short exploratory flights, scientists and cartographers obtained vital information about the topography of Antarctica.

Until today there is no airport in the so-called “White Continent”, but there are 50 runways.
Australia and South Africa are just two of the world powers with interests in Antarctica.

As the aviation website Simple Flying notes, the Russian Antarctic Research Station organized a half-dozen test flights to its 914-meter blue ice runway between 2019 and 2020. Those were carried out with wide-body aircraft as well.

Given that the vast majority of people arrive on the continent by boat, seeing the A340 land on an ice runway is certainly spectacular, and it means there will likely be more such landings in the future.