Why Planes Fly Over the North Pole but Not the South Pole

Have you ever wanted to fly between Perth, Australia and Buenos Aires, Argentina nonstop? Probably not, but it should make you mad to know that even if you did want to, you can’t. That route would go almost directly over the south pole, and—with the exception of super specialized sightseeing flights—there aren’t any commercial flights that us regulars can go on that fly anywhere near the pole. Why? Well, there are a few reasons.

The first problem with flying over Antarctica is pretty intuitive: it’s cold. Cold enough, in fact, that in March of 2001, the FAA put in place special rules governing what are called “polar routes”—any plane or magical sleigh flying above 78 degrees North or below 60 degrees South.

Based on the rules of Boeing website, to fly over “the poles”, all you need to remember is one simple word: SCEMPT.  With SCEMPT, flying over the poles is a breeze. Keen pilots may notice that the first letter of SCEMPT is “S,” which of course stands for special training. All pilots and crew manning polar flights must have special training for flying in arctic conditions and maintaining equipment in the extreme cold. Your crew must also have access to at least two cold-weather anti-exposure suits, because if you have to get out of the plane at an unexpected stop it might be cold. Before you chart your course, the FAA will need to sign off on a route of emergency alternate airports for unexpected landings due to mechanical or medical issues, and plans to evacuate passengers from each of those airports within 48 hours of landing. During the flight, you’ll need to closely monitor your fuel temperature, because if your fuel starts to drop below freezing temperature, you’ll need to change your altitude or just give up and fly to Cancun. Polar flights will also necessitate the use of charts with your true heading, rather than traditional magnetic navigation. That’s because the poles have an area of magnetic unreliability, due to science.

Now, while these extra rules might disincentivize a route over Antarctica, they wouldn’t necessarily prevent it—after all, commercial flights regularly follow these rules up north. Major routes like Dubai to Los Angeles, New York to Hong Kong, and New Delhi to San Francisco all shave hours off their flight time by flying over the North Pole, either because Earth is a sphere or because there’s a very generous time wizard hanging out somewhere in Greenland. But there must be another factor at play—and that’s where our second problem comes in.

Basically, every commercial twin-engine plane is given a certain rating for how far it can be, at any given time, from a suitable diversion airport. This is to make sure that there’s always a runway that a flight can divert to in the event of an emergency, like if one of your engines fails or you run out of those little bags of peanuts. This rating is called ETOPS, and it’s measured in flight-time—before 1985, all twin-engine planes were ETOPS-60, meaning they could only ever fly within a 60-minute radius from an airport. Because of this restriction, flying over any major stretch of ocean had to be done by larger three or four engine planes.

As planes got better, ETOPS numbers went up—nowadays, most common commercial planes like the Boeing 737 and the Airbus A320 can have a rating of up to ETOPS-180––that covers about 95% of the globe: pretty much everything… except for Antarctica. To put things into perspective, the closest potential diversion airport to the South Pole is the Ushuaia International Airport in Argentina, but it’s still about 2,500 miles, or 4,000 kilometers, away. That’s like spraining your ankle in Manhattan and walking to Nicaragua to get it fixed… assuming you can walk at 560 miles per hour in a straight line over the ocean, in which case a sprained ankle probably isn’t that big of a problem. It’s not a great analogy, but the point is: the South Pole is far away. Even the longest-range commercial aircraft in the world, the Airbus A350, caps out at a rating of 370 minutes—leaving a fairly large chunk of the continent off-limits to law-abiding pilots.

Despite all of these restrictions, an airline could, theoretically, route a flight over part of Antarctica—they just need the right plane, the right equipment, and a specially-trained crew. At the end of the day, though, there just aren’t many routes over Antarctica that make sense. The vast majority of international flights already take place in the northern hemisphere, since that’s the hemisphere with 90% of Earth’s population and 100% of Earth’s M&M stores. Now, some flights do come close to the Antarctic coast—like the routes between Sydney and Johannesburg or Santiago—and depending on wind conditions they will sometimes fly over a tiny bit of Antarctica, but absolutely zero go anywhere close to the pole itself.