When Lufthansa Flight 2574 takes off from Frankfurt on February 1, it will be carrying three crews on Lufthansa’s longest flight ever, and one of its most unusual—it’s a 15-hour 8,500-mile support flight for an Antarctic expedition.
The A350-900 will be making a bee-line for Britain’s Mount Pleasant Royal Air Force base in the Falkland Islands, carrying a Lufthansa crew picked from 600 volunteers, the science research crew, and the crew of their ship. There will be 92 aboard the 300-seat plane. All passengers and flight crew are now undergoing a 14-day quarantine.
From the Falklands, the passengers will rendezvous with the vessel Polarstern, and will head for the Antarctic; the returning crew and researchers from the ship will fly back to Germany on Feb. 3 as Flight 2575. The research ship usually does its crew change at Cape Town, South Africa, but because of the current increased virus rates there, the switch was moved.
