I thought Russia charged huge fees for airlines to fly through their airspace. Apparently that's not true anymore, but this BusinessInsider BlogPostThing has a lot of interesting history I wasn't aware of.
That article seems to be saying that they introduced the route to save time vs a longer, unspecified route - unless I missed it, I didn't see anything about soviet airspace.
Flying from CPH to HND via Alaska adds almost 2300 miles vs flying direct over Russia:
The Soviet blockage was a motivation for exploring the polar route rather than a direct route through Russia and China, since both of those airspaces were closed.[1] While it turned out to be even shorter, it wasn't a route without difficulties, as emergency landings would prove very difficult compared to over south Asia.
Thanks for the link. Also, I was just playing with routes, and it looks like a route (that I roughly constructed) under russia is still 100s of miles shorter than through Alaska (for the hypothetical CPH-HND route). I don't know if there are other issues with flying over any of those countries. And maybe with Alaska as a hub, it could end up being more efficient to fly there and then switch and onward to eastern Asia, although I thought that newer planes were favoring direct routes rather than huge planes between hubs, e.g. the A350 vs A380.
Not to mention, historically people who don't have to often avoid connecting in the US because I think there is / was an extra visa burden, even if it's just for transit. I think many people might avoid a route that makes them enter the US, though mayb things have changed and it's less of hassle.
Your route has the plane flying very close to Russian airspace from Istanbul to Baku. Also, it has the flight going over North Korean airspace at the end. Avoiding these two would be required. While it would add too many extra miles, it does illustrate the point that these route planners are not trivial.
Early planes like the 707 could not make it all the way to Asia in one go, so the stop in ANC was necessary. It's the largest airport for hundreds of miles in any direction.
That route also goes through the PRC which was closed for a few decades to outside airplanes as well. And some of the other countries on the map were part of the USSR as well.
The article mentioned flying under Russia would be a longer distance but could be faster with favorable wind conditions. I’m guessing they are leaning toward more predictable conditions with their chosen route.
If emergency landings were a such a serious consideration why do so many flights go straight over the Pacific ocean? I always think if we go down here we’ll be hundreds of miles from help. Unless they fly over really heavily trafficed sealanes and I’m not aware.
There are rules about how far from an airport a plane can be, depending on number of engines (redundancy) and how it is rated. If you go to gcmap.com I believe it gives ranges for ETOPS which is a rule for big twin engine planes. AFAIK this is one reason why there are no flights over the south pole (the other being it's not on the way anywhere). Occasionally I feel like I have seen it mentioned that a plane had to deviate from the shortest route because of being too far from an airport.
Also, I recall reading that for Easter Island, only one plane can be inbound during a given window, because it is remote enough that there is nowhere to divert to. But you'd have to check to make sure I'm remembering correctly
Does this mean Anchorage's airport is going to get increased traffic again? I'd imagine planes today have the range to not need a stopover compared to the Cold War era.
> Does this mean Anchorage's airport is going to get increased traffic again?
Anchorage is already one one of the busiest airports in the world for cargo. During the beginning of the pandemic, it became the busiest airport in the world for that reason (while people weren't flying, cargo still needed to be flown).
Anchorage still gets a lot of freight flights stopping for more fuel. It’s an interesting airport to plane spot at since it is quite busy with large planes despite having so few (relatively) passengers.
For long-haul flights, it might still make economical sense to have a stopover point. A plane carrying all the fuel it needs for the full flight will burn more fuel in total than a plane that's only ever carrying the fuel it needs for only half the flight because of the weight difference.
As others have mentioned, Anchorage is a big cargo airport, and the fuel savings are one of the reasons.
At long-haul distances, a refueling stop saves fuel, even taking into account the extra take-off and landing. Taking off with all the fuel to make it to your destination means taking off with a lot of weight. And a larger aircraft to fly with long-haul tanks that will eventually be empty is inefficient too.
This is called "Intermediate Stop Operations". Of course, there are other costs beyond fuel (landing costs, staffing costs, etc.), but sometimes you can make this an advantage (e.g. staff always sleeps at home base each night).
> In some studies it was found that fuel savings are in the order of 13–23 % (the longer the mission, the more fuel could be saved) for missions with a single stopover if aircraft are used that are optimized for shorter ranges
There are a very long list of reasons it’s normally sub optimal.
First your generally going out of the way to stop at an airport which means a longer trip, plus you need to climb back to altitude which means lower efficiency. Landings and takeoffs are harder on many systems which means more maticance. Time a major factor as not only are aircraft doing fewer routes passengers are also waiting around. Safety is another issue for adding stops, landing and takeoffs are much higher risk. Etc
It can be a net benefit, but normally your much better served to make every stop a significant destination rather than just being for fuel.
That's where it can become more viable: When you go A->B->C instead of A->C, you have two more origin:destination pairs that you sell tickets for, depending on (?uhhhh, 5th?) freedom rights.
I often use Iceland as my example, but same idea. I’m surprised WOW airlines failed though.
As much as people hate it (especially if someone else is paying the fare), I think long-haul’s days aren’t looking great. As fuel/biofuel becomes a bigger $ proportion of tickets, multiple medium-haul hops is going to become the way.
Take into account service fee charged by airport, because landing and refueling cost is not just fuel cost but also bunch of operations by ground personnel.
I think most expensive would still be gaining altitude - but I got down-voted so might be that my understanding of this is not that good.
The math is counterintuitive but planes fly with minimal fuel because fuel is so heavy that having more fuel requires even more fuel. Fuel is a primary expense. So airlines like to stop places even when not strictly required. They don’t fill the car all the way up like you and I might.
The math isn’t counter intuitive at all. Also how rockets work (burn a lot of fuel at the beginning because you have to push a lot of fuel + cargo), also let’s drop some boosters while we are at it to get rid of even more weight.
In flight refueling might be the way to go, but then keeping the fuel plane up also takes fuel.
The article contradicts its own title. This isn't a new route, the same polar route was used 35 years ago up until the cold war ended and they were allowed to overfly Russian airspace.
The route originally was flown by 3 or 4 engine aircraft so a single engine failure still left you with at least 2. They are now flying it with an A350 twin-engine. Worst case you are 5 hours from a landing site with one engine.
> The new Arctic route, however, flies over very remote areas, where airports are few and far between. As a result, the airline had to apply for an extension of that protocol to 300 minutes, meaning the Airbus A350-900s it uses to fly to Japan can now stray as far as five hours away from the nearest airport, while still meeting all international regulations and safety protocols.
To me, "plotting a new route" means they are changing how they get from A to B.
I am a passenger in a car with a friend, carpooling to work. I say, "it looks like there is a wreck on the highway in a few miles, want me to find a new route to work?" That makes perfect sense. It doesn't matter if my friend and I have taken this alternate route before. It means we are changing our plan.
The details are different enough that it's arguable. Before there was a stop in Anchorage, and they presumably didn't fly two-engine aircraft on this route before.
I've seen them on a flight before quite some distance from the north pole. I am not 100% certain on the flight but I think it was a Norwegian Air Dreamliner flight from London to New York, which still goes reasonably far north.
Even the regular not-quite-north-pole-but-over-65-north are more than good enough. In fact, since the aurora is an oval, it's better to be a bit further south than at the pole. Not sure which the best latitude is, but guessing it's arund 70 north or so.
Peak aurora season is during and after the polar night in Dec to Mar. If the shades were forced closed, your flight was likely during the Midnight Sun period of 24h light, meaning you wouldn't have been able to see them anyway.
I hate that the 787's electrically dimmable windows can be centrally controlled! Yeah it makes sense that they are "locked open" during takeoffs and landings, but horrific when you want to look outside to see the stars and the coffee-cart pushers have locked them for the night.
I'm sure it's not only United, but keeping the windows dimmed the entire flight seems to me more like reducing the workload of flight attendants (making everybody sleep more) on ultra-long hauls so they can spend more time in the back gossiping back whatever they like to gossip about.
I wonder if planes could be built in such a way to include two sheets of outside layer, with a gas (can a gas be used to shield radiation?) in between those sheets to shield the passengers from outside radiation.
I wonder if one could build a couple of aircraft carrier for commercial airliners and post them out in the Pacific somewhere to get shorter ETOPS-compliant flight paths.
I also wonder how much fuel is spent carrying fuel and if emissions wouldn't be lower if they would fly shorter legs on fumes and do frequent refueling stops.
Minimum runway length quoted for Boeing 777 take-offs is 2500m, plus a 240m runway end safety area (a sandpit it can plow into if the takeoff is aborted without remaining space to halt). On an aircraft carrier this might be shortened a little since the ship can steam into whatever wind is present, but compare that to the 333m long flight deck on the new Gerald Ford class aircraft carriers and the impossibility is plain to see.
Habakkuk sounds like many a run-away software project, where a promising notion keeps being pursued long before its impracticability is apparent. Gems from that wiki link:
* The final design of Habakkuk II gave the bergship, as it was called, a displacement of 2.2 million tons
* The small prototype built in 1944 on a Patricia Lake near Jasper, Alberta, confirmed the researchers' forecast that the full-size vessel would cost more money and machinery than a whole fleet of conventional aircraft carriers
* [Assistant Controller of Research and Development for the Admiralty during the Second World War] pointed out the large amount of wood pulp that would be required was enough to affect paper production significantly. He also claimed that each ship would require 40,000 tons of cork insulation, thousands of miles of steel tubing for brine circulation and four power stations, but that for all those resources (some of which could be used to manufacture conventional ships of more effective fighting power) Habakkuk would be capable of travelling at only 6 knots (11 km/h) of speed.
* the enormous amount of steel needed for the refrigeration plant that was to freeze the pykrete was greater than that needed to build the entire carrier of steel
* the crucial argument was that the rapidly increasing range of land-based aircraft rendered floating islands unnecessary
And that behemoth was required for a runway half as long as current civil airliners need.
It's not as if the navy airplanes that take off and land from carriers are standard issue planes. There are very specific, pretty risky tech that goes into each catapult launch, arrested landing, etc. Doing so in an airliner full of passengers would be too risky in my view.
Not to mention the size of aircraft carrier that would be required to land even a 737.
> I wonder if one could build a couple of aircraft carrier for commercial airliners and post them out in the Pacific somewhere to get shorter ETOPS-compliant flight paths.
The various Pacific Islands like Hawaii, Guam, Midway, the Aleutians are effectively those "carriers" for ETOPS.
They successfully tested landing and taking off a loaded C-130 from a carrier in the 60s so I guess if you designed a new long range STOL airliner from the ground up it wouldn't be impossible and might even have a slim slim chance of being economical. But existing airliners, no way. And with the risks of carrier operations I don't reckon it'd be anywhere near as safe as 6 hour ETOPS.
The risk analysis alone makes it a non-starter, besides the fact that such airliners don't exist, a C130 vs a 777 is a huge difference in size, weight, range and take-off speed (80 tons vs 200 tons, 2500 nm vs 5000 nm minimum), 130 kph vs 240 kph. The C130 has four prop-jets, the 777 is a dual turbofan. Payload for a 777 is about 100 tons, C130 landing on that carrier was 12 tons.
And as for that test: there is a reason it was left at the 'test' stage, it was deemed too risky.
It is amazing that they managed to land a C130 on an aircraft carrier at all, even more amazing that they did it 30 times or so without mishap, but it is a very, very long stretch away from being able to land a passenger jet and take off again routinely, what is acceptable risk for the navy would never fly (pun intended) for passenger service.
To your first point, you cannot operate a commercial airliner from a carrier, for a multitude technical reasons. That being said, I seem to remember that, back in the day, the Navy would post ships at various remote points in the Pacific ocean to be there in case airliners had to ditch.
To your second point, yes, to some extent it would be more efficient to make refueling stops, but you need conveniently located airports, and all those landings and takeoffs add to the duration of the flight and to the stress on the airplane, so it has to be balanced.
Really, I have no idea if this comment was in jest or halfway serious but there isn't any way passenger planes will ever land on any of the existing aircraft carriers. Width, Runway length, arrestor strength, inability to do cat launches with something that heavy and so on. It isn't going to happen.
That’s when you know the technical conversation in this thread will go nowhere. That’s the solution? Aircraft carriers? Really? Some tech people do have a strong sense of entitlement about how easy some problems are to solve.
63 meter wingspan for a 777 vs 40 meters for a C130, flight deck width of an aircraft carrier is about 80 meters so in theory that is possible but it would be pretty scary, I don't know of any airport where there is an obstacle the size of an 8 floor building sitting right next to the runway.
They can definitely touch down on one. They just can't also come to a stop on the same one, or even get to the other end with both wings attached.
Though if you fitted a tail hook to a 747, probably some of that 747 could be said to have landed there. Maybe a few passengers too, and you could claim the fastest disembarkation speeds into the bargain. Turnaround times might suffer depending on the depth of the water.
A flight I took last week, TLV->SFO went within 20 miles of Ukraine -- it usually flew right over it. Today I'm on the flight back, and I've heard that they will be rerouting even further, and add about 25 minutes to the flight plan.
Too close for comfort, you really don't want to be on the next MH-17, and I really would not put it past Russia to pull stunts like that again. The safe range from any airspace that has Russian controlled hardware in it is roughly the range of their AA missiles.
My FIL is coming here soon and Qatar airlines DOH->IAH leg flies right over Ukraine normally https://flightaware.com/live/flight/id/QTR713-1647752880-sch... . The recent flights show they have adjusted to fly just west, but that's too close for comfort for me.
Your "huge supersonic drone" is in reality a subsonic one, that's smaller than an F16 and flies no higher than 19,700ft while a typical airliner cruises at 35,000 to 41,000ft
It is huge by drones standards. It shows that it is easy to miss a missile or a plane in the air there. Russia attacked targets 20 km from Poland border. It is just a bit more than a minute of flying of a transonic plane and even less for a high-speed missile. 60-80 km is inside a normal combat range for S-300 air-defense system. The point is that 45 miles from the border you can still easily happen to step into a combat zone and get into a path of a plane running and maneuvering away from a missile or a missile chasing or even lost/reacquired target. The next link illustrates dangers of flying even 300 kilometers away from firing air-defense systems even during the peace time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberia_Airlines_Flight_1812
Should we be concerned about ETOPS (colloquially "Engines Turn Or Passengers Swim") being extended to 300 minutes? That's up to 5 hours of hand-flying a jet with a failed engine.
You wouldn't need to hand-fly in most instances, Autopilot will remain on and is more than capable of dealing with single engine operations on dual engine aircaft.
Of course it's always an issue if an engine does fail, but ETOPS as a certification is there to ensure that airplanes and pilots are not put under unreasonable amounts of stress or issue if and when an engine fails over-water.
Reminds me of a trick question from the time Finnair started to fly over the pole: Once there was so much demand, that they had to fly with two planes. They flew side by side, directly over the pole. So one of them crossed the international date line and the other did not. How come they landed on the same date?
The IDL isn't the only line of longitude where the date changes; there is another, the line of midnight. Either one plane crossed each, putting both on the next day, or one crossed both, with opposite sense.
If you fly over the pole you basically cover 180 degrees of longitude, and it matters little whether you take the 180 that cross the date line or the 180 degrees that don't.
Crossing the date line is just an artifact of the singularity at the pole.
I don't know if any others of you are of a certain age and remember having to fly through Anchorage in your youth... Back when DC10s either couldn't make it all the way nonstop, or for cost reasons a stopover in AK made it marginally profitable.
So I am in this situation right now. My Father in law is flying here (Houston) from the Philippines, and one of the cheapest flights is with Qatar, which connects in Doha. The Doha to IAH flight happens to fly directly over Ukraine, however looking at flightaware, recent flights have been adjusted to fly just west of the Ukraine border.
> How do all these new polar routes affect the workload of the people staffing our Arctic radar stations, if at all?
If you are referring to the people doing the radio work, through the magic of HF radio they sit in a nice warm office in Ontario, Canada.
I doubt it will increase their workload much as its not a busy route and there's not much ATC to do given the sparse nature of the region. Its more of a monitoring service per-se.
P.S. They are not "new" routes. They've been around for decades, just lost popularity due to better options.
If you mean en route radars, those should not be affected. Those are big rotators that work the same, 24x7, regardless of how many planes are in the area of the coverage.
Is that going to stomp on the accelerator for climate change to have increased jet traffic burning fuel near/over the pole?
This war might be going on for the rest of the decade, has there ever been that much traffic over the pole that we know for sure what will/won't happen?
Since some European counties now considers recovery of nuclear power [1], the overall emissions will likely actually decrease, even despite this increase due to longer flightroutes. Fuel prices also rise, which yield less driving.
These planes however might have enough measurable influence on the local microclimate that may increase the rate of methane leaks. I haven't checked the numbers though.
Aviation emissions are around 2% of total emissions (but have a stronger effect on a per-ton basis, so might be 5% of total effect). These routes are a tiny, tiny slice of the aviation sector.
But anyone taking such a plane trip will exceed their own carbon budget for that year. We really need to rethink aviation and we really need to reconsider how much of it is actually needed. I would not be surprised if 99% of all flights could be eliminated if we accepted living in a slower world.
https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-uses-airspace-restric...