Polar route
[citation needed] In 1936, Levanevsky and navigator Victor Levchenko completed a more-than-19,000-kilometre (11,800 mi) multistage flight from Los Angeles to Moscow in a Vultee V-1A floatplane, thus proving the possibility of an air route between the United States and the Soviet Union via the Bering Strait.
Their flight [ru] from Moscow to Vancouver, Washington, United States, via the North Pole on a Tupolev ANT-25 single-engine plane (June 18–20, 1937) took 63 hours to complete.
[2] The following month, another Soviet crew led by Mikhail Gromov retraced the transpolar route [ru], extending the distance to the world record-breaking 10,148 kilometers (6,302 miles), landing near San Jacinto, California, in the United States.
[citation needed] In August of the same year, another Soviet crew led by Sigizmund Levanevsky started its long distance transpolar flight from Moscow to Fairbanks, Alaska; the radio communication with the aircraft broke off beyond the North Pole, and all subsequent search missions failed.
[citation needed] In October 1946, a modified B-29 flew 15,163 kilometres (9,422 mi) nonstop from Oahu, Hawaii, to Cairo, Egypt, in less than 40 hours, further proving the capability of routing airlines over the polar icecap.
[5] Air France was the first to operate commercial jet service over the North Pole on the routing Tokyo – Anchorage – Hamburg – Paris on 18 February 1960 using Boeing 707-328 Intercontinental equipment.
[citation needed] In April 1967 Japan Air Lines (JAL) began an experimental service between Tokyo and Europe via Moscow across Siberia.
[citation needed] During the Cold War, Anchorage International Airport (ANC) in Alaska was a technical stop for a number of airlines flying the polar route between western Europe and Tokyo.
U.S. based air carrier Western Airlines also flew a polar route during the early 1980s between London Gatwick Airport and Honolulu using DC-10-30 aircraft, with these flights also making a stop in Anchorage.
Russian Long-Range Aviation now perform some of the same types of training flights, testing the readiness of Alaskan Command and Royal Canadian Air Force interceptors.
Aircraft like the Boeing 747-400, 747-8, 777-200ER, 777-200LR, 777-300ER, 777X, 787-8, 787-9, and 787-10, as well as certain variants of the Airbus A330, A340, A350, and A380, with ranges of around 13,000 kilometres (8,100 mi; 7,000 nmi) or more, are required in order to travel the long distances nonstop between suitable airports.
Emirates and Qatar Airways fly nonstop from Dubai and Doha to the US West Coast (San Francisco, Seattle, and Los Angeles), coming within a few degrees of latitude of the North Pole.
This has led airlines to avoid Russian airspace when flying to certain destinations, including Eastern Asian cities from the US and Europe and vice versa.
[24][25] One instance includes Japan Airlines, whose Heathrow Airport-Haneda Airport route now flies over the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, Iceland, Greenland, Canada, the Arctic Ocean, and Alaska, crossing the International Date Line in the process.
Commercial flights began with Aerolíneas Argentinas, with service from Buenos Aires via Rio Gallegos to Auckland in the 1980s flown with a Boeing 747-200 aircraft.
[35] LATAM Airlines began their LAN800 and LAN801 nonstop flights between Santiago de Chile and Sydney via Auckland in April 2015 with twin-engined Boeing 787 aircraft with a 330-minute ETOPS rating.
However, in February 2018, it was stated that Norwegian Air Argentina is considering this "less than 15 hours" trans-polar flight between South America and Southeast Asia, with a stop-over in Perth en route to Singapore.
[citation needed] The FAA's policy letter Guidance for Polar Operations (March 5, 2001) outlines a number of special requirements for polar flight, which includes two cold-weather suits, special communication capability, designation of Arctic diversion airports and firm recovery plans for stranded passengers, and fuel freeze strategy and monitoring requirements.
[citation needed] For polar flights, FAA allows,[43] under certain conditions, the measured freeze point be used instead of assuming the spec value in ASTM D1655.
