I’m assuming there’s a factual answer involving the capability of passenger aircraft.
Could a passenger aircraft fly between Ushuaia - Malvinas Argentinas International Airport and Cape Town International Airport via flying over the South Pole? If so, what and what IATA rules need to be violated?
Stranger
I do not think that route would fly over the south pole.
The distance is certainly doable by plane.
ETA: Playing with a 3D computer globe (runs in a web browser: 3D Interactive Globe ):
The suggested route in the OP would definitely not take you over the South Pole (you wpi;dn’t even see Antarctica).
Going to Melbourne, Australia would though (as a shortest route). Probably anywhere in SE Asia.
“wouldn’t” (missed edit window by seconds)
There doesn’t seem like any real reason to fly over Antarctica for commercial reasons, other than for sightseeing (which ended for a time following the Mt. Erebus Disaster).
Interesting from that article - I did not know that Quantas is flying sightseeing trips to the Antarctic.
I thought these had all stopped after the 1979 Air New Zealand flight powered into Mount Erebus on Ross Island, killing all 257 on board. We could still see bits of the wreckage when I flew around Mt. Erebus in 1995.
Feel free to modify airports to make it doable
Let’s assume the hypothetical that IceWall Airlines wants to detour over 90 deg S
Not considering flight rules or how far a plane can fly (which these days some can make it near halfway around the world on one tank…so almost anywhere) the website linked below will let you see a great circle route between two airports/cities on a 3D globe. A great circle route is the shortest route between two points on a globe (please don’t start with oblate spheroids).
Ushuaia - Malvinas Argentinas International Airport and Cape Town International Airport
Ushuaia - Malvinas Argentinas International Airport and Melbourne, Australia
Ushuaia - Malvinas Argentinas International Airport and Perth, Australia (this gets you really close to the south pole…as close as I could find without trying too much)
Interestingly, I tried Auckland, New Zealand from Ushuaia and the shortest route was west over the Pacific. It seems there are not many routes (relatively speaking) where going over the Antarctic is the shortest route between two airports.
Perth - Buenos Aires gets you pretty close to the South Pole.
From what can tell without spending too much time researching it, Sydney - Johannesburg, Sydney - Santiago, and Santiago - Melbourne are the only regularly flown commercial air routes that even come close to Antarctica, and even they don’t really come that close.
I think it would be legal to do if you used a plane with 4 engines like a 747, A340, or A380. Using a twin engine plane would probably violate ETOPS rules.
Apparently we are in the weeds and I think people are misunderstanding the question so let me clarify.
Start at an airport in a passenger jet. Fly to the South Pole. With a minimum course correction i.e as straight as possible, fly to another airport. Land
Is that possible technologywise? If so, what air traffic rules are violated.
Please don’t fight the hypothetical. I’m not looking for a great circle route the flies over 90 degrees S. Assume it is two routes: TO the South Pole and AWAY from the South Pole.
A great circle route that almost passes over the pole could, of course, be slightly tweaked into a route that does actually pass over the pole. And as @Whack-a-Mole mentioned, plenty of planes have the range for it.
Just as a heads up (as many non-local people might not know this juicy fact) …
Malvinas is the Argentinan name for the Falkland Islands … and it’s obv. the argentinan way to let anybody know they are theirs.
IIRC you can’t fly from Ushuaia “Falklands/Malvinas airport” to the Falklands, you can only fly from Punta Arenas (Chile);
As shown above, Ushuaia to Perth gets really close to the South Pole. So close that, as @Chronos mentioned, a minor course correction would be no problem and go right over it. Indeed, I’d be willing to bet if a commercial flight made that trip on a regular basis they would tweak it to fly over the South Pole so they could use it in advertising for the flight and maybe charge a little more.
The distance of that flight is about 6,500 miles (10,380 km). An Airbus A380 can fly 9,400 miles (15,000 km) non-stop so this would be easily done including legal fuel reserves. A 747 is almost exactly the same range. Some 777 and 787 could have the range too (depending on the version). Probably other Airbus planes too.
It is certainly technically possible with lots of planes flying today. Whether it is against regulations or environment laws I do not know.
FWIW the current longest flight in the world (non-stop) is Singapore to New York. 9,537 miles, a little over 18 hours. You could buy that ticket today if you wanted to.
That would go over the North Pole but Russia will not allow that route anymore.
You may be thinking of the ETOPS / EDTO standards. Aircraft are effectively certified to fly only a certain distance from diversion airports.
Traditionally twin engine jets (eg 737s) were subject to stricter time limits. They were permitted to fly such that they were never more than 60 minutes (on a single engine) from diversion airports. Three or four engine jets were less heavily regulated.
Some twinjets eg variants of the A350 are now certified to fly up to 370 minutes on a single engine (“ETOPS 370”). That’s about 6hrs at a somewhat reduced speed, meaning those aircraft could make something pretty close to the hypothetical routes across the South Pole discussed above.
There are similar rules for three of four engine jets (EDTO) but I cannot tell you what they require.
(I may have some technical details wrong here and one of the various pilots will probably be along to correct me.)
I’m on my phone so this will be terse.
For airliners there are technological limitations on passing directly over the poles. North or South does not matter. The issue is the usual equations for nav on a 3D sphere get wacky at the poles. Plus GPS goes to shit much beyond 80 degrees latitude.
You haven’t been really lost until your nav system crashes at a pole, your computers have no clue where you are, and you’ve got 3000 miles of white nothingness in every direction. With damned few airfields for the first 2,000 miles. So don’t do that.
The limits vary by aircraft type. I can look it up later tonight, but IIRC here at the bar awaiting dinner the 777/787 which are designed for trans-polar ops are limited to latitude 87 or 88. The decidely non-polar 737 is more like 77 or 78.
Sounds like a software problem 
As you know, spheres are perfectly symmetrical and there is nothing funny going on at the poles.
Near the North Pole, at least, there is increased marine activity, and projections used for navigational charts include the modified Lambert Conformal, the Gnomonic, the Stereographic, and the Azimuthal Equidistant.
This could have something to do with it.
That is what those X-hours-on-a-single-engine regulations seem to be about. Amundsen disappeared trying to rescue missing members of an airship which crashed while returning from the North Pole…
I’ve worked with computer programs for problems like this (not that specific one; mine was orbital dynamics). A good, competently-written program should be able to deal gracefully with coordinate singularities. Then again, my program was the only one out of the whole class that didn’t choke, so there are certainly programs out there that can’t handle them. Although I would hope that airplane navigation systems would be held to a high standard.
IIRC they certainly could be written to handle the coordinate singularities. Butvit was deemed simpler / safer / cheaper to just say avoid that one small 60 or 120nm radius right at the poles.
Not that the software would necessarily crash, but there’s no reason to build in the code to maintain full accuracy right there. So you might end up w degraded accuracy for awhile. Traffic isn’t much up there but it’s not zero either. We still need pretty tight accuracy measured in miles. Which gets progressively more challenging as the size of a degree of longitude gets tiny.
But planes fly TO the pole, or darn close to supply the research station there, so obviously doable.
Brian