The Route
The expedition orgranisers will travel from Belgium and the intrepid aviators will meet them first in Luxembourg, at the main Luxembourg Airport, with the film crew coming from England.
From Luxembourg, the aviators will fly their tiny airplane up through northern Europe to a first stop in Stockholm, Sweden at Skavsta airport.
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From Stockholm Skavsta it is a straightforward flight in their Cessna up through Sweden and into Norway, with the landscape getting more snowy and icy as they approach the Arctic Circle. They go on, right up to the northernmost city in Norway, Tromsø [pictures below], the launch point for the first long leg over water.
The city of Tromsø is over 200 miles above the Arctic Circle and it provides the first real taste of Arctic weather conditions for the aviators, the expedition organisers and the filming crew.
Then the adventure begins in earnest: just shy of 600 miles flight over the ice-cold water between Tromsø and Longyearbyen, the main settlement on the island archipelago of Svalbard. In a small single-engine plane.
Time to put on the survival suits and get going.
No - wait a minute - the engine has failed! Fortunately, while still on the ground at Tromsø airport, just before take-off. A narrow escape.
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An engineer, Stefan Poeppl, dashes to Tromsø from Germany to make emergency repairs.
A day of repairs, then time to try again; if they are brave (crazy?) enough.
So, take 2: take-off from Tromsø to Longyearbyen on Svalbard.
The brave aviators make it to Longyearbyen on Svalbard: the jumping off point for start of the 'real' trip: their attempt to reach their ultimate destination - the North Pole!
Svalbard Fun Facts
Svalbard is an archipelago of islands, around 800 miles above the Arctic Circle. It is administered by Norway, but has a governor with wide-ranging powers, like an old-style colonial governor who is appointed. No-one gets to vote for him or her, or for that matter, anything else on Svalbard.
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Longyearbyen is the northernmost town in the world (the largest settlement on Svalbard)
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Svalbard is like Hotel California for some, where you can check-in but never leave. Any nationality can go at any time for any length of time and no passport, no visa is needed to go there or stay there. If you arrive via Norway on a short tourist visa and outstay the Norway visa - no problem in Svalbard but you are then trapped: with no visa for Norway, if you travel back to the mainland you are deported
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As a result it is home to people from more than 50 nations
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It's illegal to die there
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Cats and ferrets are illegal
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It is home to the Global Seed Vault, a repository of the seeds of all the World's plants, in a disused mine. The Global Seed Vault houses and preserves a wide variety of plant seeds as spare copies of seeds held in gene banks worldwide. Svalbard was chosen due to its remoteness: if the whole rest of world went to hell, at least the plants would be saved in this out-of-the-way place.
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There are more polar bears than people
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.. And because of this you are legally required to carry a gun when away from the main settlement
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It has permanent daylight from mid-April to mid-August and permanent darkness from late October to mid-February when everyone walks around with head torches on the whole time
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The buildings and structures are all build on stilts, due to the permafrost
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It has the northernmost ATM and the northernmost university (albeit small !)
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Camp Barneo
Possibly the most desolate place on earth, besides Antarctica. The name 'Barneo' is a Russian joke: it is the Russian way of saying 'Borneo', an ironic name they give to the camp to indicate how warm and balmy it is (not).
Camp Barneo is set up each spring for a few weeks, for scientific expeditions to the North Pole. It is only a few weeks as it is too cold and the weather too harsh earlier, and it can only be there a few weeks because by later in spring the sea temperature is warm enough to melt the ice from below. So everyone has to get out before the ice is too thin: otherwise they would sink through into the near-frozen water to the Arctic Ocean floor, more than two miles below.
A chilling reminder of the real and ever-present dangers at the North Pole
