AV I AT I O N T O U R border of the DGAC/Accra and GOOO/Dakar FIRs, which crosses the 0 line at around 0.7S. If you do veer approximately 38 miles off course and press your face against the window to peer down below, hoping to see what Null Island looks like, you wont see much, sadly. The island was actually invented as a bit of a joke. However, paddle out in a boat (its about 310nm from the coast of Ghana) and you will find 17 buoys, all of which are named after a different musical genre. Right at the centre, wibbling and wobbling around the 00 spot, is the Soul buoy, otherwise known as Station 13010, happily measuring a whole load of weather-related things. Zero Ninety A lot of folk will have flown close-ish to the North Pole, as heading over here is a handy way to get from anywhere in the northern hemisphere to anywhere else far away in the northern hemisphere fairly directly. It is a place of bleak icy nothingness, rising cosmic radiation levels and, occasional, beeping alerts for those who have forgotten to set their heading to True. If you are misfortunate enough to drop out of the sky while overhead, then your closest land is Kaffeklubben Island (still a good 385nm away). Its name means coffee club, which is rather apt as most pilots rely on the stuff. Anyway, this rocky outcrop doesnt appear to have ever been inhabited, let alone have anything close to resembling an airport on it. The entire island is only about 2,300 feet long, so good luck stopping on it if you do attempt a landing. For diverts in this part of the world, you might do better heading for YLT/Alert (with its 1,676m-long runway), YEU/Eureka (1,464m, and with possibly the coolest looking terminal, if you like sheds), or LYR/ Svalbard (2,484m and actually a proper airport). While in Greenlands most northerly town, surrounded by massive icebergs, you will find NAQ/Qaanaaq Blue sky over Moai at Rano Raraku, Easter Island, Chile Pack ice near the Arctic island Spitsbergen/Svalbard in the North Pole region (measuring a measly 900m). An interesting history fact for those aviation pub quiz questions: the first commercial polar route took place in November 1954, by SAS, from LA back to Copenhagen, with a few stops in between for fuel. Another interesting fact: the distance between geographic North and Magnetic North (known as magnetic declination) is 500km or so, and is constantly shifting. In 2019, True and Magnetic North were actually aligned, but, right now, Magnetic North is moving towards Siberia at about 55km a year. Currently, it lies on Ellesmere Island in Northern Canada, at around 86N 163W. Zero (the other) Ninety The actual South Pole has people on it, living in the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, among others. You can reach it by aeroplane, albeit only from November until February, which might make it a rather long layover. The airport code is NZSP/Jack F. Paulus Skiway and it has a not too shabby 12,000ft runway, which can support an LC-130 Hercules. Is the Skiway part of the name a joke? Disappointingly, no. Definitely quite slippery and, unlike blue ice runways (which have been rollered to push all the air bubbles out, strengthening it and providing something of a PCN so it can handle wheels), a skiway does literally require the aircraft to wear skis. Anyway, the Jack F. Paulus bit is named after CDR Cadillac Jack, a former VXE-6 pilot with a lot of cool experience, including piloting the first 40 THE LOG Win 24 pp39-42 Crossing the seven seas.indd 40 01/12/2023 16:46