Pole route
The Polar route or Polar route is a flight route, or at least via one of the poles over the polar regions. The spherical shape of the earth means that long-haul flights between destinations in the northern hemisphere have the shortest distance if they are led far north; the same applies analogously to the southern hemisphere.
North polar route
First flights
The first flight on the north polar route was made by the Soviet aviation pioneers Valery Chkalov , Georgi Baidukov and Alexander Belyakov . From June 18-20, 1937, they flew with a Tupolev ANT-25 from Moscow over the North Pole and then on to North America, where they landed in Oregon . The flight lasted 63 hours and covered 9130 km (as the crow flies 8504 km).
On September 18 and 19, 1945, i.e. immediately after the fighting in the Pacific War ended, three American Boeing B-29s flew from Hokkaido via Alaska to Chicago. In October 1946 a Boeing B-29 also flew non-stop from Oahu (Hawaii) to Cairo in Egypt.
The flight of the three B-29s in September 1945
commercial use
The first commercial flights over the Arctic Ocean were on the route between the eastern United States (New York, Washington, Chicago) and East Asia (Japan, Korea, Taiwan). Anchorage Airport in Alaska was built as a stopover for this purpose .
In Europe, the Scandinavian SAS was the first airline to fly over the Arctic. In 1954 she set up the first direct air traffic from Copenhagen to Los Angeles, with stopovers in Söndre Strömfjord on Greenland and in Winnipeg (Canada). A Douglas DC-6 was used for the flight .
In 1957, the SAS then also offered flights to Japan on the polar route. With only one stopover in Anchorage, a Douglas DC-7 flew from Copenhagen to Tokyo. The route via Alaska was not the shortest route from Europe to Japan, but it would have led via northern Russia and Siberia, and the Soviet Union did not issue overflight permits during the Cold War . Compared to the previously usual southern route on the way from Europe to Japan, the travel time sank from 50 to 32 hours. When jet planes were deployed a few years later, the travel time fell further to 16 hours.
In 1983 Finnair went one step further. With her McDonnell Douglas DC-10 , she did without the stopover in Anchorage and flew from Helsinki directly to Japan via the North Pole and the Bering Strait.
After 1990
After the end of the Cold War and in view of the modernization course in China, the situation has changed. Flights from Europe to East Asia can now take the geographically cheapest route via Russia and Siberia. The global importance of the Anchorage airport has thus disappeared.
Flights over the polar region take place today when distant destinations in the northern hemisphere are to be approached. Examples are the flights of Emirates of Dubai in the Western US (Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles) or flights from the eastern US to China or Southeast Asia.
South polar route
Some flights from South America or South Africa to Australia or New Zealand go via Antarctica.
Radiation exposure
The shielding from cosmic radiation (radiation from the earth ) by the earth's magnetic field is weakest in the northern and southern polar regions. That is why the radiation exposure during flights in the polar regions is significantly higher than in other regions. People who frequently fly in these regions can receive radiation doses that are comparable to dose levels received by professional groups who use ionizing radiation or handle radioactive sources. At Alitalia , the flight crew enforced in the 1990s that the polar route may no longer be flown.
Individual evidence
- ^ Gerhard Wissmann: History of aviation from Icarus to the present . Verlag Technik, Berlin 1966, p. 458 .
- ↑ radiation exposure of the flight crew. (No longer available online.) In: springermedizin.at. September 29, 2011, archived from the original on August 26, 2017 ; accessed on August 26, 2017 (English). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ BfS - cosmic radiation when flying - cosmic radiation when flying. In: bfs.de. May 6, 2017. Retrieved August 26, 2017 .
- ↑ Environment: tremendous rattle . In: Der Spiegel . No. 17 , 1994 ( online ).
