UPDATE: Icelandair Boeing 767 has landed in Antarctica

On the evening of 24 February, an Icelandair Boeing 767-300ER passenger jet registered TF-ISN took off from Keflavik Airport (Iceland) with destination Antarctica, in order to pick up Norwegian scientists on a research expedition.

The first leg of flight FI1010 was a 12,000-kilometre hop from Keflavík to Cape Town. From there, the plane should head for Antarctica, where it must land on a rudimentary runway carved into the ice with grooves in the ice to provide the friction for aircraft to land.

There are no less than 20 Icelandair crew on the flight: 6 pilots, 13 flight attendants, and one flight engineer.

The Boeing 767 will pick up the crew of research centre Troll, operated by the Norwegian Polar Institute and located in the eastern part of Antarctica on the Princess Martha Coast.

After a brief stop at the bottom of the world, the aircraft should return to Cape Town, continuing to Oslo to disembark the scientists and their equipment, and finally home to Iceland.

In 2015 another Icelandair aircraft, a Boeing 757-200, landed in Antarctica, being at the time the largest airliner to ever land on the continent. In November 2019, a Titan Airways Boeing 767 performed six flights between Cape Town and Novolazarevskaya, a Russian Antarctic research station.

UPDATE 26/02/20231