Imagine checking in for a 12-hour, 6,000-mile flight, yet not needing to show a passport because it's a domestic journey. No, this is not a trip across all 11 time zones of Russia: it is a flight chartered from Qantas by a firm in Sydney with the suburban-sounding name of Croydon Travel (00 61 3 9725 8555). The passengers are looking forward to a trip on the world's biggest passenger aircraft, an Airbus A380, on the last day of the year, from Sydney to Sydney – via Antarctica.
Before Concorde's flight path was set towards heroic oblivion, the only profitable function of the commercially hopeless supersonic aircraft was the joy-ride, a two-hour spin over the Bay of Biscay that negated the plane's original premise: to get people from A to B shockingly fast. Instead, spendthrifts flew quickly and noisily from A to A.
While researching today's Traveller's Guide to Antarctica, I was intrigued by the plans for the maiden flight by the Airbus "SuperJumbo" to the seventh continent – not least because this is a big people-moving machine rather than a glass-bottomed plane. So I diverted from the gripping heroics of Shackleton, Scott and Mawson a century ago to the 21st century to investigate the intricacies of a flight where, when there's only one sensible answer to the question "window or aisle?" Or is there ...?
*** Class divisions are contentious in aviation. While Concorde was a classless plane, even "one-class-fits-all" airlines such as easyJet and Ryanair offer a priority-boarding scheme making some passengers more equal than others. On long-haul flights, Qantas has four classes: economy, premium economy, business and first. But the New Year's Eve departure to Antarctica has no fewer than seven grades.
Top of the heap are the first- and business-class passengers, but even they will be allocated two boarding passes at check-in. The reason: halfway through the flight, passengers at window seats swap with the person next to them. Third class comprises "business centre": the middle seats in the business cabin, for which you get only one boarding pass. But the company promises "ample viewing can still be achieved by walking to any available window space or exit zone".
Fourth-class passengers occupy the premium-economy cabin, but by now the window seats are getting sparse. For half the flight you sit in an aisle seat, ie at least two seats away from the window. The organisers cannot guarantee a window seat for the rest of the flight – you could be sat one tantalising seat away from the view.
The passengers in fifth class, "economy superior", who have the same uncertainty, at least know there are two categories below them. "Superior" in this context translates as "not over the wing": being told the research station is directly beneath the starboard side could prove disappointing for passengers in sixth class, "economy standard". Croydon Travel says: "The viewing of Antarctica is out, not down from the aircraft."
*** The lowest of the low, in seventh class, pay less than one-sixth of the fare of their fellow passengers in first: £555 compared with £3,500. They get a boarding card labelled "economy centre". Given the layout of the economy section of Qantas's A380s, with 10 seats abreast, this could be a lonely place to be. The organisers, who have run many trips before with a Boeing 747, assure those in the cheap seats: "There is a fantastic atmosphere of co-operation, with most passengers sharing the experience." That's "most", not "all".
Two miles up: too high for comfort
Ernest Shackleton's diary for Christmas Day 1902, during his first failed bid for the South Pole, reveals his party dined on seal liver. The 21st-century Antarctic explorers on the New Year's Eve sightseeing flight will enjoy a more lavish feast than the 20th-century pioneers. On-board scientists are on hand to enlighten them, and passengers can listen to the pilots' two-way radio conversations with research stations on the ground.
A camera mounted in the cockpit will be linked to seat-back video screens to provide a pilot's eye view. But the aircraft will get no closer than two miles to the surface of Antarctica, rendering the continent's amazing wildlife invisible – save for the tell-tale brown smudges indicating the presence of tens of thousands of penguins (don't ask).
However good the end of the world looks from a first-class window seat, my advice is to invest the fare on a sea-level trip.
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