Suitable alternatives
 

I have been out of the long haul loop for some 15+ years now but I'm fascinated seeing on FR24 these aircraft going over the pole (more or less). What are they using as en route diversions? The recent AF diversion highlighted the problems involved in a crippled aircraft diverting to a remote airfield, and Goose is not the most remote, I'm sure.

I always remember chatting to the bored air traffickers at Churchill in the middle of the night. How many other airfields have not only ATC, but fire crews and others at standby?

I'm interested, that's all.

Churchill, iirc, was an alternate landing site for the US space shuttle.

I diverted into Amsterdam just after midnight once. That's a major airport in a major European city and open 24 hours a day..... -ish.

... There was zero support available at that time of day - after curfew and the last commercial flight, non-essential staff go home. No ground power (even though my APU was U/S and I was running a live engine for power). No stairs. No passenger transport from the remote stand. It took hours to simply get the passengers off the aircraft - and that only happened as a tower ATC guy (who was going off-duty) used to work ramp and still had a valid airside bus licence.

Flying at night, you can be more "remote" than you think - even over high density areas.

Churchill 9200 ft and Goose is 11000 ft..... I believe Goose was an alternate as well.
Anyone know ?

Never mind the North Pole, this is the one that scares me - Auckland to Buenos Aires - 5600 nm.

For reference, the light blue shows the 180 minute ETOPS areas.

The route is currently flown by Aerolineas Argentinas using A340s. Even with four engines, mid-flight is a long way from anywhere.

SYD-SCL and SYD-JNB are even worse from that point of view!

I’ve just discovered that the service is now being operated by Air New Zealand using a 789!

What kind of ETOPS rules do they operate under?

Zrh - Anc
 

Sondrestrom Air Base.....often planned Fairbanks with enroute diversion to Anchorage as tight on fuel on the DC10..Elmendorf as Alternate some times as well
Thule airforce Base as well.

@India
You mean Auckland to Buenos flight NZ30.
They may have some RR delays at the moment.

A0283,

It certainly looks like it:

https://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/...ml#post9982562

blind pew,

I’ve spent a bit of time in the Canadian Arctic and know how important the proper clothing is.

Did you have to provide your own Arctic gear or was it part of the aircraft equipment?

Checkboard, what year was that? Can't be a recent experience.

On Flat Earth it's only about 2.000 NM
:O

Space Shuttle alternates is a long list.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_..._landing_sites

When I flew the polar routes we used Thule, Fairbanks, Spitzbergen and some unpronounceable airfield in northern Siberian coast. 240 minutes Extended Range Operations, space meteorology briefing by a qualified dispatcher, fuel freeze analysis of the fuel loaded was required.

Re the Shuttle....warning...a digression,,Churchill is at almost 59 north, whereas as I recall it the shuttle rarely tracked more than about 52north, and only on certain missions (usually when accessing the ISS). In short in orbit it would never have overflown Churchill and to land there would have needed to have done a lot of cross range manoeuvring on entry...The shuttle might have been capable of doing so on a good day, for a limited portion of a high inclination orbit flight, I don’t know, but I’d guess the opportunity for doing so would be so rare it wasn’t worth planning on..hence it’s not on the list. .( BTW the ability, or not, of the shuttle to go cross range on reentry and if so how by how far was another unfortunate complication in it’s development, and one of the reasons it ended up with a bigger wing than ideal and a lower payload carrying capability than ideal...blame the USAF...).

Anyway back on thread....in our much slower lower world we no longer regard Churchill as suitable anyway, due to lack of support.

BGTL, BGSF, CYZF, CYFB are all emergency options enroute. In terms of filed alternates, BIKF would be the most northern one we use... along with others mentioned here.

We have up to 330 EDTO for SAEZ I believe (haven’t operated there) but can do it in less if SCIP is available.

India 4 2
 

No clobber although I bought a US army surplus lined raincoat for wandering around ANC during winter.
We had them as emergency enroute diversions just in case of a fire or something else catastrophic.
Our airline was belt and braces and a piece of string ..including having armed sky rangers in the 80s.
Sadly the airline, like many first rate carriers, is no longer with us after an on board fire led to a loss when the crew couldn’t get it down on time.
Interestingly our topo for the region was a national geographical magazine free handout as there wasn’t anything else available. Enroute safety altitude iirc was 14,000 ft over Greenland as the map showed a snow covered 12,000ft plateau as no other information was available (to us).
I thought we would have to be extremely lucky to get away with a fire and the most likely scenario of lobbing into Sondestroem would be a decompression which happened occasionally and would have left us with insufficient fuel to reach anywhere civilised.

It was about five years ago?

Very strange, especially just after midnight. I only asked because in my pre retirement job I used to see plenty of pax flights inbound to AMS after midnight. But perhaps your diversion was on one of their quieter nights in the dead of Winter.

Don't worry, we're up to 420 minutes twin-engine ETOPS with certain aircraft (eg A350) under certain conditions, are we not, so pretty much anything is possible if the beancounters and aircraft salesmen want to make it so. Perhaps the B787 series is still "only" 330 minutes; I haven't looked it up recently.

For myself, I think I'll pass on the opportunity to sit listening to one engine labouring away for 5.5 - 7 hours as we trundle along at single-engine speed, looking at a freezing ocean below and hoping like hell that the problem that stopped the other one isn't going to repeat itself, and that the diversion doesn't close unexpectedly while we're doing that. My faith in the power of statistics to overcome Gremlins just isn't strong enough.

I know, I know, stand by for incoming, silly old fool just doesn't understand the brave new world, if you're worried about related failures you're no better off in a quad. But I just don't like the idea of depending on one engine's health for that long.

And I'm also uncomfortable with the approach that says "we need this aircraft to be just a bit more reliable, so let's maintain it just a bit more carefully, and remove components before they fail" which is the essence of the airworthiness element of ETOPS. For me, I would prefer that slightly more careful maintenance to be the norm.