Why are there no airline flight paths across the south pole?
It seems a no brainer for flights to and from Australia to the tip of South America or Africa.
Australia - Africa flights would not cross Antarctica anyway.
There's not much demand for travel direct from Western Australia to Chile and Argentina. The closest pass to Antarctica by a scheduled flight is probably the Qantas route from Sydney to Santiago de Chile, which sometimes crosses the icecap, but often diverts away to avoid strong winds.
Only 4-engined airliners could operate over Antarctica itself (the land mass) due to restrictions on twin-engined craft operating out of range of diversion airports.
Planes are required by law to carry special survival gear in order to fly over Antarctica. The means extra cost and weight which is not viable for commercial airlines, therefore none use the Antarctic routes.
The area is so vast that airliners will not be cleared for flights that would take them over there as they would be too far from a place to land safely in case of emergency.
You will find the Wiki link below interesting and informative on this topic
Airliners always have to be within a certain distance of an airfield for safety reasons. Flying right over the south pole takes them too far from safe landing points.
Its the same reason they do not fly directly over the ocean, they need to be able to make emergency landings. There's nowhere in antartica that they could land a large plane. Plus remember the quickest route between two points is a straight line right? Except the earth is not flat, and its a sphere, so that straight line is actually a bow following the curvature of the earth, and all fight paths are set based on that.
Neither of the Great Circle routes between Johannesburg and Sydney or Santiago de Chile and Sydney do not go far enough south to reach Antarctica. Argentinas, until a few years ago, used to have a non-stop flight between Buenos Aires and Sydney, but that route too did not go far enough to overfly Antarctica.
Based on the aircraft, an airliner must stay within a certain distance to an airfield. That limits paths.
The distance from Australia's major international southern airports to the major international airport in either Southern Africa or South America is shorter going over either the Pacific or Indian oceans than it would be going over the Antarctic
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