Airbus A340 landed in Antarctica for the first time

Created on 08.12.2021 15:59

Boutique airline Hi Fly organized the first historic flight to the Southern continent. The flight number 801 departed on November 2 from Cape Town Airport, South Africa. The customer was Wolf's Fang. Having covered 4,630 km in five and a half hours, passengers spent less than three hours in Antarctica.

Only the highly qualified aircrew can operate to the mainland owing to the difficult conditions and the absence of any modern metering devices. The only useful system on the runway are the hand-carved slots. Landing and stop-over of the enormous A340s at the aerodrome was not a big challenge, given the runway length of 3,000 meters.

Short research missions enable scientists and cartographers to obtain a vital information about the topography of Antarctica. However, there is not a single airport on the Fifth Continent, but there are 50 runways.

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