If you are so lucky to win a vacation in Honolulu and you live in Europe, you have to fly to LAX (Los Angeles) and then to HNL (Honolulu), spending almost 18 hours of your time up in the air. By flying over the North Pole -from Europe to Hawaii- the flying time would be reduced down to approximately 35%.
So, why airliners do not fly over the Poles? Because of 5 technical reasons.
Lackness of radio communication & assistance: Poles are too far away from the closest available ATC facility and the extreme weather conditions do not allow to build any radio beacon (VOR) in these regions. Besides, radio communication’s quality would be poor due to the Earth’s magnetic field bending.
GPS and navigation referements are subject to errors due to the narrowing of parallels and meridians. Therefore measurements become inaccurate as much as the plane is approching the North or South Pole (0’-0’ coordinates).
Overflying Poles means beeing too far away from any alternate airport in case of emergency: since airliners cannot land on icy runways, the safety of any Pole’s flight would be put in danger.
Flying over the Poles (as military and scientific aircrafts do) requires specific equipment for ensuring takeoff and landing capability on icy runways and additional heating systems for Jet-A1 fuel tanks. Besides, flying crew must received an appropriate training for Artic/Antartic operations and they have to bring on board very heavy suites for outside extended operations at very low temperature. All these facts means additional costs.
Radiation: at the Poles the atmosphere’s depth is lower than in the rest of the globe, therefore the amount of radiation absorbed by human body at any given altitude is much bigger. Flight and cabin crews that would fly frequently above the Poles would soffer from a variety of deseases caused by the high level of radiation absorbed.
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