This will shave six hours off a flight from London to Fiji, which had to either stop in Los Angeles or Seoul en-route.
There’s a good side and a bad side to this.
The good side: Thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people traveling the Virgin Air (and other airlines) great circle route from London to Hawaii or Fiji will be able to see that the North polar ice cap has not melted away as some would believe have forecast.
The bad side: Sir Richard Branson, who has paired up with Al Gore in the past as a global eco champion, may take a hit from having planes spew jet exhaust in what some people call a highly sensitive region. I wonder if an EIR had to be filed for stratospheric effects? From The Independent:
Airlines cleared to use Santa’s short-cut
New destinations and shorter journey times on way after North Pole route is approved for passenger jets.
Hard-pressed airlines have been handed the perfect Christmas present: permission to fly twin-jet aircraft over the North Pole, saving millions on fuel costs, opening up new destinations and reducing damage to the environment.
…
Sir Richard Branson, president of Virgin Atlantic, told The Independent: “This new development really does open up a whole new world and will allow us to take our Dreamliners to more exciting and exotic places. Our new fleet of 787s could well be flying to Honolulu or even Fiji one day.” Fiji straddles the 180-degree line of latitude, and the most direct track passes directly over the North Pole – though because of the distance, over 10,000 miles, the payload would need to be restricted. The new policy could also make no-non-stop routes to Tahiti in the South Pacific and Anchorage in Alaska viable.
…
And Sir Richard Branson looked forward to new sightseeing opportunities: “Apart from the stunning destinations on arrival, the Arctic scenery will be just amazing on the way.”
================================================================
I look forward to all those tourist photos and video from the window seats saying;
“Gosh, look at all that ice, I thought the North Pole had melted according to the Guardian!”
Full story at The Independent
h/t to Dr. Ryan Maue
Addendum: Since some people haven’t clicked through the link to the article, they get the mistaken impression this is “new”. It’s only new for two engine jets, of which Branson has many. Four engine jets have been making great circle routes for years but two engine jets have been limited by ETOP rules related to an engine failing and distance to nearest airport. – Anthony
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Dave Springer says:
December 25, 2011 at 5:37 am
“Fiji straddles the 180-degree line of latitude”
Fiju must be in a different dimension of some sort. Is there a wormhole over teh North Pole that gets you there?
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Perhaps they own the International dateline and get all its 180 degrees on that side of the world ??
Speaking of longitude though, it does remind me of an interesting story I heard from when the dateline actually did run through one of the Fijian islands (which I have had the pleasure of visiting twice). With the major religion at the time being British-derived Methodism, opening a shop on a Sunday was forbidden. One enterprising shopkeeper had a great solution. He had a long shop straddling the dateline, with a door at each end. You can guess the rest.
Bula
Oh, right over top the pole.
Bombay/Mumbai-Edmonton is close to that.
(BOM-YEG)
People were trying to fy that at one time to connect substantial East Indian population of Canada to India.
Existing routes go over much of the Arctic, Anchorage-Heathrow for example is well north, to Germany would be a bit further north, to Moscow even further but probably not a popular route..
(Once south like Tokyo and Bejing the optimum route is over Russia, but cost/permissions/safety may be factors.
http://www.gcmap.com/ gives theoretical GC routes, however winds and permissions/ATC costs will affect routing.
The Copenhagen-Los Angeles route didn’t get really close to the pole, but the later Copenhagen-Anchorage-Tokyo line was very close to it.
http://gc.kls2.com/cgi-bin/gc?PATH=CPH-ANC-NRT&RANGE=&PATH-COLOR=red&PATH-UNITS=nm&PATH-MINIMUM=&SPEED-GROUND=&SPEED-UNITS=kts&RANGE-STYLE=best&RANGE-COLOR=navy&MAP-STYLE=
Oh, right over top the pole.
Bombay/Mumbai-Edmonton is close to that.
(BOM-YEG)
People were trying to try that at one time to connect substantial East Indian population of Canada to India.
Still it’s 259 miles from the pole. To make a flight over the pole the origin and destination would have to be 180deg Longitude apart, and London-Fiji is the only combination that I’ve been able to find which meets that criteria, making it a rather unique route.
I had the great pleasure of flying over the Arctic from Toronto to Beijing in June (and back) and Toronto to Shanghai in September. In June it was ice as far as I could see and in September – a lot of cracked ice but still extensive.
Ottawa-Singapore would pass over the pole:
http://gc.kls2.com/cgi-bin/gc?PATH=yow-sin&RANGE=&PATH-COLOR=red&PATH-UNITS=nm&PATH-MINIMUM=&SPEED-GROUND=&SPEED-UNITS=kts&RANGE-STYLE=best&RANGE-COLOR=navy&MAP-STYLE=
Uh, yes Anthony, I am one of the persons who didn’t read well enough to see that the news was twin-engined aircraft. Embarassing, as I was close to the original effort of twins operating in oceanic/remote airspace.
The key is distance to a diversion airport, which must have suitable weather forecast. In the High Arctic of Canada, I guess that Inuvik and Thule are the closest paved runways, as Resolute Bay is gravel. (Many flights from western NA to Europe would use Sondre Stromfjord in Greenland as a diversion point, presumably with Thule AFB as a backup.)
With old four-engined aircraft the industry tended to overlook the risk of systems failures, but fuel prices and amount of use have taken even many 747s out of service.
I’d also check what survival gear is required.
Fuel reserves will tend to be greater on those routes, and flight operations rigor stronger.
As for Francois’ “exhausted pilot” remark, extra crew are onboard and there is a rest protocol, such as naps of max 40 minutes and sleeps of min 2.5hrs IIRC. Not optimum, since a person is not going to get REM sleep, but they do get much rest. Semi-private bed areas are above the ceiling, where there is much space in a wide-body fuselage.
As for pax, I hope they let people walk around when not sleeping in spacious recliner seats (no BA back-of-the-airplane seats-jammed-together foolishness).
As for navigation, “Ralph”, polar flights use free-gyros (not magentic compass) and more capable INS (used Doppler in the old 707 days).
I’d also want to check the claim of a GPS “hole”, since those satellites orbit the earth.
They are not the geo-stationary communications ones whose aimed antennas don’t provide good coverage in the High Arctic (but HF does, especially with HF Datalink now) and there’s Iridicum which also uses orbiting satellites.
WAAS augmentation of GPS may be limited, as that is broadcast from geos, but that is not necessay for the navigation discussed herein.
And regarding contrails, keep in mind that flight altitudes with relatively local piston-engined airplanes in WW II were rather lower than today’s long flights with turbofan airplanes. That might make a difference.
As for night, keep in mind a factor is heat loss to space (much of it IR?), though not nearly as much in winter up there as at night to the south.
Keith Sketchley
I don’t think the problem TP is having is because GPS doesn’t work, because it has worked in (Lat/Long mode) at the both poles for more than twenty years, but it is with his use of the grid system with the GPS.
There are more than one grid systems but the Military Grid Reference System (MGRS) is a common one. In the areas near the poles the lines of longitude or meridians converge together so fast that a grid system designed for lower latitudes doesn’t work well. So, in the polar regions, a different convention is used. South of 80°S, UPS South (Universal Polar Stereographic) is used. North of 84°N, UPS North is used.
Even handheld GPS’s allow you to change from Lat/Long mode to different grids. If you draw a line through the orange peel diagram of UTM grid below, near the top, you can see that the line goes through a slice, then empty space, then through another slice etc. A GPS set to this grid would likewise work and then quit as a person goes through the slices.
To make a long story short I think the GPs needs to be in Lat/Long mode or UPS North.
http://www.gpsinformation.org/dale/measure.htm
A little off topic but heard this story the other day.
After the war, Churchill entered the men’s room off Parliament and found him alone with the man who had taken over the Prime Minister’s slot, Clement Atlee. Although there were 18 urinals, Churchill headed for the corner while Atlee remained in the ninth position.
Clement: What are you doing way over there Winston. The election is long over.
Winston: Whenever you see something big Clement, you want to nationalize it