Why are commercial airlines not permitted to fly over the north or south poles?

Why are commercial airlines not permitted to fly over the north or south poles?

Well for one they don't have the technology to do so. Its cold there. Even colder in the air. Commercial airplanes will have their engines freeze up

They do it all the time.

Do over the North pole. Shortest route between N. America and Europe.

Commercial planes fly over or near the North Pole all the time. For instance, JFK to Beijing goes almost directly over the pole:

No one flies over the south pole because the distances to any nearby airport, should trouble occur, are too great.

It has nothing to do with temperature. The temperate at 35,000 feet is far colder than any arctic or antarctic temperatures.

It is restricted airspace. The ice wall is guarding the edge of the Earth.

Planes have been flying from Europe to North America over the North Pole since 1937. In June 1937 Valery Chkalov, Georgy Baydukov and Alexander Belyakov flew from Moscow to Vancouver, Washington in a Tupolev ANT-25. Three weeks later Mikhail Gromov, A. B. Yumashev and S. A. Danilin flew an identical aircraft from Moscow to San Jacinto, in Riverside County, California. Gromov's crew actually reached San Diego but turned back because they were unable to land due to low visibility. When they landed, they still had enough fuel on board to reach the Panama Canal.

While there are many flight routes that pass near or over the North Pole, such as Emirates' flight from Dubai to San Francisco for example, there are really no routes that pass over the South Pole. This is not because the aircraft are nor permitted to fly there but because there are no city pairs that would require routing this far south. The furthest south the commercial flights venture is South African and Qantas' flights between Johannesburg and Sidney, but even they stay north of Antarctic Circle. Air New Zealand used to have a sightseeing flight over Antarctica, but these flights ended after one of its DC-10s crashed into Mt. Erebus in 1979.

There are no restrictions. Airlines fly over the North Pole all the time.
Shortest distance between the West Coast and Europe.
There's no need to fly over the South Pole.

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