Do commercial planes fly over Antarctica? For example a flight from Sidney to Rio perhaps?
It seems like there are few possible great circle routes that go over Antarctica and none of those have scheduled non-stop flights: http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/general_aviation/read.main/907589/
Not since 1979. And those where sightseeing flights rather than point to point.
One of the problems with the Mercator projection is that it shrinks the Southern hemisphere. Sydney’s actually at 33 degrees south (roughly the same equivalent of San Diego) and Rio’s at 22 South (equivalent to Kolkata). Would you expect to fly over the North pole from San Diego to Kolkata?
Wikipedia’s aricle on Polar routessummarises it well:
55 degrees south is broadly equivalent to the Belfast’s latitude.
If something happens to a plane while flying over the southern Atlantic, Pacific, or Indian Oceans, boats can eventually reach it.
But in inaccessible Antarctica? Surely the lawyers have warned the airlines how much the lawsuit would cost them.
Except for New Zealand to South Africa no great circle routes go over the Antarctic, so it makes no commercial sense to fly there anyway as it’s not the shortest route. Liability issues are very much secondary to that.
How about flights over northern Greenland or other remote northern areas? Would the same kind of lawsuit apply there?
When I used to fly Toronto-Tokyo regularly, the flight passed over Alaska and down the Russian coast. There’s a lot of mightily-remote territory there, yet it’s a daily flight for Air Canada. I doubt inaccessibility of the overflown area is a big consideration of airlines.
Can anyone name one case where a commercial airline flight went down mid-route and there was survivors to be picked up?
Planes either crash on landing or takeoff, or through catastrophic failure mid-flight (very very rarely), in which case there are no survivors, so the accessibility of the wreckage is irrelevant.
The problem is not inaccessibility but of having alternate aerodromes. You need to have somewhere to go if you have an engine failure or depressurisation mid route. On shorter sectors you can use the destination and departure airports but on longer sectors you may not be able to carry enough fuel to continue to the destination after a significant systems failure, also twin engine aircraft are more restricted on how far they can be from a suitable aerodrome at any point on their route. They are typically limited to a max of 2 to 3 hours flight time from an alternate. Whether that is a problem for Antarctic flights, I’m not sure, but it’s a big consideration with route planning.
Qantas has done Antarctic scenic flights since then. The next one is scheduled for 31 Dec 2011.
Sure. The route of American Airlines’ 777 service from Chicago to Delhi does come pretty close to the Pole.
According to this site a great circle route from Sydney to Rio does actually go over the Antartic land mass:
That kind of proves my point, it was more than 30 years ago and a small prop plane unable to fly high enough to just fly straight over the Andes, it had to fly through mountain passes.
Any examples involving a modern jet airliner I meant?
No commercial airline flies Sydney-Rio non-stop. Apparently the route would require 330 minutes ETOP rating, which the 777 is just getting certified to now.
Well, since you asked, how about United 232? If that had happened over the Arctic ice cap rather than over Iowa, I seriously doubt that as many people would have survived. I agree with your main point that such incidents are rare, but there’s a lot of space between “rare” and “never”.
Just off the top of my head, the worst single-plane crash, JAL 123, actually had four survivors that had to spend a cold night in the mountains before rescue. Also that hijacked Ethiopian jet that dead-stick ditched off Madagascar had almost half survive and rescued by private & tourist’s boats.
But yes, it is rare. Consequently I do believe that if there were more land in the Southern Hemisphere and it therefore made economic sense you would see regular great circle routes over Antarctica. But of course, were that the case, you’d also see many more maintained airports on the southern continent to support air travel over it.
Here’s another sort-of example: Air Transat 236, which ran out of fuel (!) over the Atlantic Ocean but was able to glide 120 km to the Azores. If they had been forced to ditch, it seems plausible that there would have been at least some survivors in need of rescue.
That is what I was thinking. So are there flights from Sydney to Rio? Do they skirt Antarctica?
I only found out about that flight after seeing it on NatGeo’s Air Emergency (aka Mayday). That was even more amazing than Gimli. So many things went wrong for it to even happen, yet so many things also went right for them to have all survived.
Reason I think this incident isn’t more famous is because it happened like two weeks before 9/11…
See post #13. There are no non-stop flights.