Finnair returns to fly over the North Pole: the reason why

After 30 years, Finnair is returning to use the unusual North Pole route to fly from Helsinki to Tokyo, Japan. Let's find out why

Have you ever wondered what it must be like to fly over the North Pole? If you are interested in the answer, you can ask the passengers of the Finnair flight AY073 on March 9., which covered the distance from Helsinki, Finland, to Tokyo Narita Airport, Japan, following this unusual route.

A choice dictated by the need to circumvent the closure of airspace over Russia, affecting all routes from Northern Europe to East Asia-a consequence, then, of the war in Ukraine that began on February 28.

How to arrange a flight over the North Pole

This was not a first, actually, for Finnair. The North Pole Route had already been traveled originally in 1983. It had been active for about a decade before being decommissioned. A shorter but nonstop trip, which over time had proven not to be all that advantageous compared to the long traverse over Russia. Until now at least.

"Flying over the North Pole is probably a present thing. On every pilot's wish list. For me, though, this flight had additional personal meaning," said Aleksi Kuosmanen, one of the four pilots on the recent Finnair flight. His father Ismo, in fact, was part of the crew on the historic first Arctic flight in 1983.

Using the Lido flight planning system developed by Lufthansa, Riku Kohvakka and his team were able to plot the route from Helsinki to Tokyo while avoiding Russian airspace, Flying over Norway, the Svalbard Islands and Alaska. Nothing was left to chance in the planning of this most unordinary trip: "We worked with the flight operations engineer to see if escape procedures needed to be updated."

The search for information and travel time.

One of the main aspects of the work consisted of researching information on the Possible alternative airports present along the route, to be ready to land in any eventuality. "There were airports along the polar route-in Scandinavia, northern Canada, Alaska, northern Japan-that we had never used before," Kuosmanen explained.

The aircraft chosen for the flight was Finnair's Airbus A350. One of the most suitable for travel in cold temperatures. "It is very resistant against cold air masses - stressed the Finnish pilot - The fuel system, for example, is built in such a way that cold air rarely limits our operations."

Finnair's Arctic flight from Helsinki to Tokyo Narita lasted a total of 12 hours and 54 minutes. Just two minutes longer than planned. Said Kousmanen again, "With this planning, the colo was no different than any other. The only real difference is that the good old magnetic compass we have in the cockpit has gone a bit haywire.". Of course, this was also planned, but it did not create major problems since the compass serves only as a backup instrumentation to the electronic navigation systems.