Scenic flight breaks new ground over Antarctica
In a historic outing from Melbourne, 200 eager passengers on board a 787 Dreamliner have gone where no one’s flown before.
“From MEL to ZZF” says the boarding pass, meaning we’re on a flight from Tullamarine to could-be-anywhere. Destination ZZF doesn’t exist on the list of international airport codes.
Undeterred, 200 eager souls pile aboard the Qantas 787 Dreamliner for flight 1336, bound for chimerical ZZF. A few in trekking boots look like they plan on hiking once there. That’s not going to happen. We’re on a non-stop round trip, the world’s first sightseeing flight to the South Pole.
Airborne and with French Champagne flowing, we settle in for a 13,500km, 16-hour ride. The PA system comes alive. Chad Carey, managing director of polar travel specialists Chimu Adventures, welcomes us, adding, “We’ve been looking wistfully at the Antarctic interior for years, wanting to fly there,” he says. Today it happens.
Chimu and other travel companies have long operated sightseeing flights to Antarctic regions closest to Australia, but not to the polar zone. It took more than a year to negotiate air-traffic clearances, and much more, with three governments to get this pioneering excursion into the air.
An earlier promo pitch has reckoned passengers will be among “the few individuals in human history to have visited the South Pole”. Well, kind of. Unlike those who went before, we’re cruising smoothly at 7300m and tucking into sourdough crumpets and coffee. Then things change, or at least my perceptions do. Four hours into the trip we catch our first glimpse of Cape Adare and the Antarctic coast. A Mexican wave of excitement ripples through the plane and it’s clear that no matter how you “visit” Antarctica, the first sight is a starburst moment in everyone’s personal history.
A fissure-crazed ice field below us stretches like a sea of shattered china, a willow-pattern world gone abstract. We cross the Ross Ice Shelf, the world’s largest body of floating ice and then see the Transantarctic Mountains looming to starboard. “If you were to set foot almost anywhere down there you’d still be the first person ever,” says Chad.
The hard men of the heroic Age of Exploration staggered across this hallucinatory landscape a century ago, racing to reach the pole first, all for empire and glory, if not frostbite and death. A T-shirted gent a few seats behind me enthuses, “Wait til I tell the kids that I went to the South Pole on Sunday.”
The whiskered ghost of Norwegian Roald Amundsen, first man to the pole, might snort with frosty incredulity. Similarly, the tragic Brits – Robert Falcon Scott, Titus Oates and co – who made it there one month behind Amundsen, only to perish, might turn in their icy tombs, over which we will soon fly.
Somewhere down there two Sydney doctors, climate advocates Gareth Andrews and Richard Stephenson, are attempting the longest unsupported ski crossing of the White Continent. We make radio contact with them and Andrews greets us over the PA, noting, “It’s good to speak to someone new.” He expands on their climate-change awareness project before signing off to continue hauling a 160kg sled for 2023km.
Below the wing, a vast white drop-sheet shrouds everything like a Christo-wrapped continent. Volcanic peaks jut from it like dragon spines and snow-draped pyramids. As we circle above beautiful, fatal Mt Erebus, the cameras go wild, from smart phones to bazooka-barrelled telephotos. Passengers scamper from side to side across the cabin to catch the ever-changing topography; the aircraft, we’re assured, won’t tip and spiral, cartoon-like into a snow-domed demise.
And then, after seven hours of flying, there it is, at 90 degrees south – Ultima Thule, the Geographic South Pole. If the flight here has been a drama of spectacular glacier tongues, ice-filled caldera and sculpted sastrugi snowdrifts, the almost featureless polar plain is at first a visual anticlimax. We pivot seven times around its imaginary maypole, peering down from 5200m towards the dark clusters of the US Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. The vision is more lunar than polar, like the moon’s Sea of Tranquillity but with an American base. I’m told there’s a ceremonial South Pole down there, a photo-op prop that features, of course, a barber’s pole. And that members of the polar station’s Three Hundred Club sometimes dash naked around it in a sort of hypothermic fun-run.
The “Ice Cube” Laboratory, the world’s largest neutrino-detection facility, sits apart from the main compound, as does the ominous Dark Sector Lab. And then, unseen, there’s Amundsen’s tent, abandoned in 1911 but thought to survive in cryogenic-like suspension about 20m below the surface.
Captain Alex Passerini strolls through the plane – four Antarctica-rated Qantas captains share the flying duties. I ask why we don’t fly directly over the pole? “There’s a clean-air zone at the pole,” he explains. Researchers study the “hole” in the polar ozone layer from here, so all atmospheric pollution is kept to a minimum.
It’s time to turn north again, homeward bound. And time to break out our second boarding pass, the one from ZZF to MEL. More Champagne. Everyone swaps seats from windows to aisles or vice versa. Throughout the flight, passengers in all four classes have amicably shared their window views. No one has been too territorial, hogging a spot or going the grump. With drinks, meals and expert commentary, it’s like a school excursion. We have on board passengers from all over, including the US, Germany, New Zealand and Bendigo.
We fly a different return route northward. To our left, remote Beardmore Glacier spills off the Polar Plateau like a slo-mo tsunami. Further east is an ice-horror escarpment Amundsen called the Devils Ballroom. We leave the polar 24-hour daylight behind and head into diurnal dusk, and then night.
Hours later, a new field of light appears ahead like a shoal of glittering sea ice. Soon we’re drifting-in over the neon berms and grid-lit bergs of Melbourne. At 10pm on the dot flight 1336 touches-down direct from ZZF, postcode unknown.
John Borthwick was a guest of Chimu Adventures.
In the know
Chimu Adventures’ South Pole Scenic Flights embark from Melbourne Tullamarine. The next departure date is December 3, 2023. From $1865 (limited-view economy class) to $10,885 (premium business class).