Can you land on the north pole?

There really is a runway on the north pole. A pilot who used to post here (the one who pranged the Aztec at the Scilly Isles recently) landed there.

Whether it has approaches, I doubt.

I looked on Flitestar and there is a waypoint called NOPOL. I wonder where that name came from?

I also wonder who is enforcing the CAS up there?

From the above it looks like NOPOL is in the USSR…

I wonder how he found it, given that typical certified GNSS navigators are not approved north of 89 degree latitude

Do they actually stop working?

I vaguely recall reading that the basemap (terrain etc) on a GNS box stops a long way before the poles… something like 80N / 80S. I can’t check it myself as I don’t have one. So it becomes a purely IFR flight.

You could not use the compass, or the HDG mode of the autopilot, but could use the PIT+ALT mode (wings level, altitude hold) and give the rudder a push every so often to move the track ahead to line up with the magenta line.

Peter wrote:

There really is a runway on the north pole. A pilot who used to post here (the one who pranged the Aztec at the Scilly Isles recently) landed there.

I don’t think that’s correct. Timothy fly to the North Pole, but didn’t land there. He landed in Canada from memory.

The closest airport to the North Pole is a Russian base.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barneo

I thought the geographic north pole was under the ice sheet, so any runway over it would float away very shortly. And the magnetic pole is moving around continuously so any runway there would soon not be.

I can assure you that you can land at the geographic North Pole, in April of each year. Camp Barneo is set up there, with a runway. In April 2003 I filmed a Cessna 206 (with a father and son) that flew from an island in the Arctic Circle, landed at the North Pole, refueled then flew back. Minus 28 degrees C. A short film at:
http://boundaryfilms.com/NorthPoleAviators.html
It costs a serious amount to do this – the North Pole landing fee with fuel is ~€15k [yes, 15 thousand Euros landing fee]

The northern ice cap is all ice so the NP will be moving all the time.

The southern ice cap is sitting on a “big rock” so that won’t move.

I reckon the €15k NP landing fee covers a lot of S&R activity

Yes, the €15k includes a big Russian helicopter there which they could use for S&R if so inclined, although I must admit I got the impression there would be a fair bit of shoulder shrugging before they put their vodka down and got on with it. Yes, the airfield moves all the time – you set off in the right direction, then use the radio to get the exact GPS coordinates when within 20 miles of where it was when you set out (5-6 hours earlier). And the built-in GPS systems in GA aircraft are typically no use – typically stop above 75 degrees north or lead you astray (true of the G1000, I know). The best GPS to use is a simple hand-held device with just a lat/long coordinate display, like used for trekking – these seem to work in the area. Compass no use of course, as it points hundreds of miles away to magnetic north. On the trip I was involved with, the airplane did go astray [would have ended up running out of fuel heading towards Greenland] but got a pointer from an over-flying SAS flight at 36,000 feet.

DA40drvr – Do you mean that the moving map feature of say a G1000 fails to work up there?

If a “camping shop GPS” works OK that would suggest that the lat/long data displayed on a G1000 would still be right, too…?

How does one navigate from one lat/long point to another one? I know there are programs which can calculate the GC distance between the two, etc. Is that what people doing this stuff use, or do they have some altogether different solution?