Hi Fly has landed an Airbus A340 in Antarctica – the first time an A340 has landed on an Antarctic blue glacial ice runway – in a charter service flown from Cape Town to the White Continent and back. The aircraft will be used this season to fly a small number of tourists, alongside scientists and essential cargo to the White Continent.
“A blue glacial ice runway is hard,” said pilot, Carlos Mirpuri. “It can stand a heavy airplane on it. Its depth is 1,4 kms of hard air free ice. The next important thing is that the cooler it is the better. Grooving is carved along the runway by special equipment, and after cleaning and carving we get an adequate braking coefficient; the runway being 3000 meters long, landing and stopping an A340 that heavy of that airfield wouldn’t be a problem. At least not on paper, as never an A340 landed before in blue glacial ice.”
Despite the difficulty in spotting the runway with no navigation aids, the pilot performed a textbook landing.
“We finally spotted the runway alignment, and started configuring early, selecting flaps and landing gear to be fully stabilized 10 miles before the runway. There is also no visual glide slope guidance, and the blending of the runway with the surrounding terrain and the immense white desert around, makes height judgment challenging, to say the least,” he said. “The altimeters in cold weather also suffer from temperature errors, and need adjustments. All this was accounted for. We flew a textbook approach to an eventful landing, and aircraft performed exactly as planned. When we reached taxi speed I could hear a round of applause from the cabin. We were joyful. After all we were writing history.”