I Tried Flying a Standard A320 to Antarctica

[00:00:00]Can our classic Airbus A320 survive a flight to Antarctica? Today, we're pushing this plane to its absolute breaking point. We need to deliver life critical supplies to Antarctica, taking them on a 6-hour journey down to Wolf Fang, a brutal blue ice runway with zero navigational way points. We'll be flying with live weather, meaning we have around 23 hours a day of total darkness.

[00:00:29]During this time of year, there is just a 1hour window of daylight to put this plane on the ice. But that's not the hardest part. The real challenge is the cold. Deep freeze temperatures of below -60° force us to drop altitude to keep our fuel from freezing, burning up our vital reserves and slowing us down. Out here, there are no alternate airports. If we miss our window, we go down. So, let's start the clock and get ready for departure.

[00:01:02]We are in Cape Town, South Africa, and we are about to do a slightly illegal flight. It's not ETOPS compliant, but it's fine. And we're taking you guys to Antarctica.

[00:01:14]>> We're going to have lots of challenges to overcome here.

[00:01:17]>> Yes, it's an interesting time of year in Antarctica at the minute. They get one hour of daylight a day and we've got to make sure that we time our arrival with that hour of daylight because this is an ice strip. We need to be able to see it.

[00:01:32]So, it is a bit of a weird one this route. The arrival airport echo November Oscar Echo is actually a dummy airport um because it doesn't exist in Sim Brief. So, what we're doing is we're putting that one in which is very very close. I think it's called something like troll town. It sounds like a really bad Call of Duty map. That's hopefully close enough where we should be able to see the airfield to make a visual approach.

[00:02:00]So, in terms of weight on board today, we've got 20 scientists and Janice, but in the cargo hold, it's absolutely full.

[00:02:08]They're bringing loads of equipment.

[00:02:10]They got loads of scientific stuff going in there. It's definitely not all Mars bars.

[00:02:14]>> And this cargo needs to make it there today. Yeah.

[00:02:17]>> And the issue is if we are slightly too late today, it'll be too dark at the airfield and we won't be able to land.

[00:02:23]Fuel pumps on. Got external power connected at the moment. Here it's uh on on the remote stand. We'll start the APU. Nice and cozy. And here it's uh in the hours of darkness. Go ahead and turn this up a little bit.

[00:02:39]So we want nose right tail left on this push back.

[00:02:43]>> Release parking brakes, please. Parking brake released.

[00:02:48]>> Commencing pushes.

[00:02:51]All engines clear. Started well. Engine mode. Select ignition start. Starting in engine number one.

[00:03:05]>> Please set parking brakes.

[00:03:07]>> Brakes engine two.

[00:03:11]>> Truck disconnected.

[00:03:13]>> Left is clear. Right is clear.

[00:03:14]>> Emergency. Leave all baggage on board.

[00:03:18]Your seat belt is fastened, adjusted, and released as shown. It must be fastened whenever the seat belt signs are on.

[00:03:25]>> Taxi for today. Just straight down to the end of the runway. We'll use full length.

[00:03:31]>> It's a veil. Uh, engine mode like norm.

[00:03:34]Yep. We'll get the APU bleed off and we'll get the APU itself off. All right.

[00:03:39]Got the taxi lights on.

[00:03:44]And also we'll get the uh radar on as well. Weather radar might be quite useful today and windshield. Clear on the right here and uh clear on the left as well.

[00:03:56]Parking brake release. Let's go.

[00:04:05]Janice, seat for departure, please. Seat for departure, Janice. Thanks. Landing lights on. There's lights to take off and the strobes on as well.

[00:04:21]Flex 66 runway check V1 rotate.

[00:04:35]Who's taking money off me? Sterile flight deck. What's the climb? Gear up.

[00:04:40]Gear up.

[00:04:52]Pop zero. Speed check. Pop zero.

[00:05:02]And there we are on our way to Antarctica.

[00:05:06]This is going to be a crazy flight, mate. Leaving Cape Town meant leaving our safety net behind. Between here and Antarctica is nothing but open freezing ocean and zero alternate airports. An engine failure out here would be an instant disaster. We were on schedule for our 1-hour landing window, but we still had six brutal hours ahead of us.

[00:05:29]With the freezing temperatures ahead, things could go wrong fast.

[00:05:35]Right. So, one of the main things we got to take into consideration for this flight, you may feel like it's the arrival airport. That's definitely a sort of spanner in the works. We got to think about weather. We got to think about actually being able to see the airport as well is a big thing. And of course, making sure we're arriving within daytime. So, that's definitely something to consider. But more important to that is actually our fuel temperature. Uh currently our fuel temperature is 4° and that's slowly cooling as the outside air temperature decreases as well. Currently the outside air temperature is -50° and the air temperature actually hitting the aircraft after that gets converted to heat and stuff like that is minus 255.

[00:06:20]The critical number that we've got to keep an eye on on the fuel is not getting it close to the minimum fuel temperature, which is -47° + 3. Uh, so we'd be looking at - 44. So on our flight today, although we have quite a lot of reserve fuel, about 2 tons, we may need to descend a little bit so there's more air pressure and more friction on the wings to warm up them fuel tanks. That's all we got really. As we get closer to Antarctica, of course, it's going to get colder, uh, which is then just going to reduce the atmospheric temperature on the fuel and slowly the fuel is just going to start decreasing in temperature. Whilst we've been talking, we've lost another degree as well. Uh, it's now 3°.

[00:07:08]For hours, there was nothing outside but freezing ocean. While inside, we were obsessively watching the fuel temperatures drop. With the sun at its highest point, we were left flying with a constant orange sunrise, hoping that the sun wouldn't set just when we needed it the most. Okay, we're just approaching our ETP. If we have a look at the fuel PR page, we are due to arrive approximately about 10:40. Uh, so we've probably got 2 hours 40 minutes of the flight left to go. outside air temperature has dropped to minus 64 degrees which is having quite an effect on the fuel. We just switch over to our fuel page. As you can see, the fuel temperature now has dropped down to -22 on the uh wing tip tanks and minus 20 on the inboard tanks, which basically means we're about halfway towards things getting quite spicy. So, we'll probably give this another sort of 7 or 8° and then we may look at our options of lowering the altitude to try and increase some of this temperature. So, yeah, 2 hours 40 roughly left to run.

[00:08:18]Um, and we're well over the ocean now.

[00:08:20]So, let's hope everything stays positive and nothing goes wrong. More time passed and the temperatures on board continued to drop. It was only a matter of time before we were forced to take action to prevent a possible disaster. Doing this route in the dead of winter might have been a serious mistake. Right, so we're now 4 hours and 20 minutes into the flight. So, we're getting there. Getting there. Outside air temperature now 64 C.

[00:08:53]And we're slowly seeing this fuel go down. It's now -34° C. It's getting a bit a bit scary now.

[00:09:03]>> So, I think what we're going to do, we're probably going to drop down to 28,000 ft. Um, and see if that helps us.

[00:09:09]Um, we'll keep an eye on it as we uh descend down. We were now so far south that our magnetic navigation completely broke down. And then we were confused by a message on the MCDU. It commanded us to select true heading. But on our pilot display, it had true blue above the map.

[00:09:29]So, we weren't sure whether the aircraft had done this for us. And we spent a bit of time trying to fix this ourself with no success. If we weren't flying in true heading mode, the autopilot would fly us massively off course. We got about an hour and 45 left in the flight. And we did just have a message come up on the MCDU which basically said select true ref, but it appears like the aircraft's done that automatically at true blue at the top. We're going to assume that's been done automatically. We were looking everywhere. We couldn't find an option for it. So, if you've got any info, put it down in the comments. Uh, but we're pretty sure it's done it automatically.

[00:10:10]If it hasn't, for the next hour and 45 minutes, we're probably just going to slowly veer off course and we're not going to be able to find the airport.

[00:10:16]So, let's wait and see. But yeah, let's get this descent programmed in and uh we'll give you an update shortly if it's working or not.

[00:10:30]Look at this. Janice looking after us today as well. Tesco's finest paw pro praw cocktails.

[00:10:37]>> Prawn cocktails. Go on, Janice.

[00:10:40]>> Cheers, Janice.

[00:10:41]>> Handcooked crisps.

[00:10:43]>> Oh, she's done that, has she? What?

[00:10:44]Handcooked.

[00:10:45]>> Tell you what, she's done a good job there, aren't she? She's good. She'll look after us, Janice.

[00:10:55]>> Okay, so first bit of bad news, fuel's getting colder.

[00:11:01]So, so far this isn't working. We're going to give it a bit more time, though.

[00:11:05]>> Oh, yikes. We've been trying to Google an approach chart for runway 17 and we've managed to find one. The only problem is none of this is in the box.

[00:11:17]So, we're going to have a go at programming this manually. We may do it completely wrong. So, we found this online. Wolfangrunway.com it's called. So, we're looking at this and we've got the actual runway here and we've got these two way points on final approach.

[00:11:35]>> Yeah. Beta gives us like 14 miles, doesn't it?

[00:11:37]>> Yeah. So, you got 9 miles and another five miles there. So, this says be above 6,900 ft.

[00:11:46]One issue is we have no meta, so we don't know what Q&H to do. We'll have the radio altimeter though, so that can kind of help us reference things.

[00:11:53]>> Yeah. Um, we're definitely going to have to rely on that.

[00:11:56]>> There'll be people at home saying, "Let's look online." There is one online that tells you the meta, but we're just wondering whether MSFS is even following that because >> Yeah, that's that's the problem.

[00:12:06]>> It's got no weather information in the sim. But let's start to get these uh way points in. So, the last way point before our center fix is Lav. Um, so if I'm going to go into Lav and we're going to put the next waypoint in. So, what we say, Brownie? what we uh >> Okay, we'll skip forward a bit here. We spent a good while trying to add these way points and for whatever reason, we just couldn't figure it out. Whether it wasn't in the system or we were just doing it wrong. We don't know.

[00:12:35]>> Oh, what's going on here, mate? We should have watched a tutorial before coming here.

[00:12:39]>> Yes, >> our company's just sent us here with no experience.

[00:12:41]>> Yeah, >> mate. When you don't even understand the example on chat GPT, I think >> that could be a bit of a problem. So, if you had, get your head around this, right? This is like GCSE maths here.

[00:12:54]>> Okay.

[00:12:55]>> If you had 123° 45 east, enter 12.5 / 60 = 0.21. So, you enter 12345.2.

[00:13:10]Is this part of the flight where I feel like we could have done some more research?

[00:13:16]>> Yeah.

[00:13:18]Okay, so we just routed direct to the center. We began our descent and we entered the destination info that we found on the website. But to be honest, we had no idea if this was going to be accurately represented in the sim, but we hope for the best and just hope that we'd get visual on our approach. Funny how on the last challenge we were staring at the fuel level and now we're staring at the temperature.

[00:13:42]>> One flight will enjoy the scenery, mate.

[00:13:44]Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Comment down below.

[00:13:45]Next video, should we just do a nice chill flight? Ideal flying conditions.

[00:13:49]>> Manny to IB for him back. Something nice and fun, nice and relaxing.

[00:13:54]>> Sick of putting myself through this stress.

[00:13:57]>> This is a bumpy ride. This >> Yeah, we're not at a good altitude here.

[00:14:01]We're really going through all the cloud layer. Have some sick passengers on the back today.

[00:14:05]>> Should we let them know what's going on?

[00:14:07]>> I think so.

[00:14:16]400 temperature that sounds old.

[00:14:36]>> Sounded great. That >> thanks mate. As we drew closer to the airport, we started to have our doubts about if the weather info we found online would match in the simulator.

[00:14:46]Since there was no weather data anywhere to be found in Microsoft Flight Sim, so we had to think on our feet and we devised a plan. The Airbus A320 shows us the current winds outside the aircraft.

[00:14:56]We could use this to our advantage. Our plan is to overfly the runway and check the wind direction and speeds and from that figure out which runway direction to use. We needed a headwind to land here as we'd need to be as slow as possible when touching down on the blue ice runway.

[00:15:21]>> Okay, we are about 20 mi away from the airfield apparently.

[00:15:26]>> Okay.

[00:15:27]>> What's that there? Is it I can see a strip there.

[00:15:29]>> Oh yeah, that's a bit off center, isn't it?

[00:15:39]Oh, I got some lights.

[00:15:40]>> There it is. Okay, so I'm going to pull head in at this point.

[00:15:46]>> We have to be careful of them mountains.

[00:15:47]My my terrain radar is not doing anything right now.

[00:15:51]>> Okay, >> our initial fly pass confirmed that runway 17 was the best for us to use.

[00:16:01]>> Right. Uh, gear down, please.

[00:16:04]Gear down.

[00:16:13]>> It's a bit windy landing this, you know.

[00:16:15]>> There's just nothing as well to reference where we are and how high we are. That's my big worry at the minute.

[00:16:23]>> Yeah.

[00:16:24]>> Might go manual speed for this, I think.

[00:16:28]>> So, okay.

[00:16:31]Or the throttle out. Is that 134 on the speed please?

[00:16:34]>> 134 34 knots >> 1,00 >> No. Let's do that again.

[00:17:05]Go around flaps. Flaps three.

[00:17:17]>> I was too high and I was well off as well, I think.

[00:17:19]>> Yeah.

[00:17:20]>> Then give us a few more chap miles just to make that turn happen, I reckon.

[00:17:24]>> Yeah.

[00:17:30]750 ft.

[00:17:40]700.

[00:17:42]This wind is is bad.

[00:17:46]450 300 200 40 23 Read.

[00:18:17]Nice.

[00:18:27]Wow, we're down. It's windy that you know that was challenging.

[00:18:33]I assume we're going to park over there.

[00:18:36]>> I think so. I do two other planes. and welcome to Antarctica.

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[00:19:03]>> Thank you very much for watching. We'll see you on the next one. See you.