“White Desert’s Successful Flights to Antarctica with HiFly: A Unique and Challenging Experience”

by time news

2023-05-15 21:25:00

The British tourism company White Desert recently finished a successful season in which it operated charter flights of the Portuguese company HiFly, to the distant continent of Antarctica. The airline, which has a base in Cape Town, South Africa, flew a pilot for the first time in early November 2021 (at the time when summer started on the continent) and a year later operated weekly flights on the Airbus A340 wide-body aircraft.

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This season, HiFly operated about 15 round-trip flights from Cape Town to Wolf’s Fang private airport in Antarctica, on a five-hour flight route. Patrick Woodhead, the owner of the White Desert travel company, told about the unique flight in an interview with the American Airline Ratings, and explained that “the plane has 267 seats, but we limited our number of passengers to 70, because we have to take precautions for the worst case when a plane cannot take off from Antarctica”.

“When we operate in this way, we can ensure that we have enough places to stay, food, toilets and water if we get stuck there. Instead of passengers, we used the free space for a lot of cargo that we brought to continue building our base there,” he added.

HiFly plane to Antarctica (photo: Instagram screenshot)

HiFly plane to Antarctica (photo: Instagram screenshot)

In addition to the A340 flights, White Desert operated twelve flights to the mainland airport by a leased Gulfstream G550, mostly at the beginning and end of last season, to bring in or take out scientists and staff. The Arctic base Wolf’s Fang first opened in 2015, and the British company first flew tourists to the small camp nearby in a formidable Soviet-era transport plane. In fact, until the use of the Airbus plane, this was how the company traveled with scientists and staff to the location.

“When we get there, we’re so far from civilization that my nearest neighbors are on the International Space Station overhead,” added Woodhead, “because the logistics here are the most expensive of any location on Earth, coming to this area as a tourist obviously involves Payment of a fee in advance”.

HiFly plane to Antarctica (photo: Instagram screenshot)

HiFly plane to Antarctica (photo: Instagram screenshot)

Woodhead also told about the challenging landing conditions in the field: “We depend first of all on the temperature. As soon as it rises above minus 6 degrees Celsius, the runway cannot carry a wide-body aircraft, since the surface of the ice is no longer solid enough. It is a dynamic runway and therefore needs To take care of the ice and make sure that it can be landed on. We cultivate the ice with special devices like ski resorts do on their slopes. The whole business there is very complicated. You also need a certain humidity, also a temperature and a little wind. Nothing is easy in Antarctica.”

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