When returning from holiday, one starts to think of holidays

[fivemack]

By 'south of the Rio Grande', I mean 'into Mexico' rather than 'anywhere south of 31N' - I thought this was standard usage, but various of my friends in Cambridge interpreted it the other way.

[Poll #1545665]

Comments

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, that's wide enough for the dip down to get far enough south ... I was thinking that Antarctica was so big, and the bottoms of Australia, Africa and South America so nicely laid out in thirds, that there wasn't a route that went right over the Antarctic continent.

[gnimmel.livejournal.com]

There are also regulations that limit how far South you can fly - aircraft have to remain within some amount of flight time from an airport that they can land at in case of engine failure/medical emergency/etc., and Antarctica doesn't have airports (aside from ice runways which specially-equipped planes can land on, AFAICR). The trouble is that the Southern oceans are also not very well equipped with runway. There are a few on islands, I think.

test flights only

[http://the.earth.li/~alex/halley/ (from livejournal.com)]

They've done some oz -> SA test flights, one of which pass over the south pole, mostly to pimp the new huge airbus, but no commercial flights beyond sightseeing tiki-tours.