How to see the most remote corners of British Antarctica before everyone else

Telegraph

18-04-2025

At first, our eyes are drawn to the thundering rotor, the long blades black against the watercolour blue sky, the bright yellow cockpit and the landing skids stuttering. Then, up, up, up we go, with endless glaciers and blistered mountains colliding in all directions. From the windows – noses pressed, camera shutters clicking against the glass, the helicopter now spinning in white sun – we see in detail what nobody on earth has ever seen before.
The icebergs are sea monsters, copious and crowded. The pearly sea ice breathes, an animal unto itself. Unnamed summits creep to the horizon. It is a landscape beset with crevasses and plateaux and ledges and penguins, and with our moored expedition vessel now out of sight behind us, there's nothing at all except the savage emptiness of Antarctica for thousands of intense, humanless miles. My heart bangs against my ribs. It is uncertainty one moment, exhilaration the next.
'Don't even blink,' says pilot Steve Martin, gripping the throttle, steady, as if he has the most normal job in the world. His voice crackles through our headsets. 'Below us, that's the stuff of dreams.'
Steve is an action movie star of a pilot: ex-SAS, stuntman-like, and, as I find out later, once in training alongside Bear Grylls. He's flown for 25 years on all seven continents, and the empty skies and infinite space of Antarctica is now his routine nine-to-five – when not soaring helicopters above ice fields and ruffled glaciers, he's planning where to land on them.
The real hero of the scene, though, is the twin-engine Airbus H145, one of two onboard Ultramarine, a polar vessel operated by Quark Expeditions, which is launching the first heli-centric Antarctic cruises in the Weddell Sea in November this year. The ship is 128 metres long, with two helipads, and its aircraft can carry travellers deeper into the polar continent than any other. Happily, I'm onboard for a preview of the new itinerary on the Antarctic Peninsula's western coast, and along with heli-flightseeing, the voyage offers plenty of off-ship adventures, from kayaking to paddleboarding to visiting abandoned stations in rarely seen nooks of British Antarctic Territory. Hurling yourself into the ice for the wildest swim yet is also an option.
Even without the exhilarating flights and vessel punching through iceberg-filled passages as we journey beyond the Antarctic Circle to 68 degrees south, an intense experience is guaranteed. Over my time onboard, every time the helicopter is in motion, I'm drawn, moth-like, to the upper deck to see it scramble into clear sunlight. It is an illusion that this is happening down here, in Antarctica, so far from the normal world. But it is no illusion. Just cavalier and half-mad.
'We know the rewards, but also the risks,' says Steve, back on the ship. Like what? His voice softens to a murmur. 'The reality is we're flying helicopters off a boat, in the middle of nowhere. There's no alternative for landing. No airport. No rescue services. We have to get back to the vessel, no matter what.' Even so, the mood around us is jubilant, and most passengers remain out on deck, transfixed. Everyone, it appears, still has their heads up in the air.
The heavy weight of the sky bears down upon us over the next few days, and the helicopters are grounded. Snow falls. Fog rolls in. Sea ice forms. It is as though we will soon be prisoners if we stay this far south much longer.
This puts the focus on consecutive days of eating extremely well and wildlife-rich zodiac cruises, where we are quick, manoeuvrable and small enough to take on some of Antarctica's lesser-explored channels. We dock at Stonington Island, hemmed in by leviathan glaciers and home to two forsaken research stations. At Red Rock Ridge in Marguerite Bay, we experience our first continental landing in the company of a vast Adélie penguin colony. Another standout moment: off Petermann Island, humpbacks, then a leopard seal, appear through the burbling ice, the latter hunting for gentoo in the first falls of snow.
Down here, farther south than any other cruise vessel at the end of the Antarctic season in mid-March, the light of snow on floe, ice on sea, is exquisite. One day, icebergs raid the shore. On another, there are hints of solitude and melancholy: a penguin sits alone on drift ice, a crabeater seal sleeps by itself on pack ice. When I look out from the port deck, I feel awe, yet see a place to embrace loneliness. Always, the icebergs are ghosts haunting the water around us.
Days later, the skies clear to brilliant blue, and the helicopter crews move swiftly back into action. The other daredevil pilot onboard is Jonny Mutch, another raffish ex-military man and ageing James Bond who used to sit looking out over Land's End from his gran's house, watching seabirds swirl above the fishing boats. 'In my mind's eye, I always wanted to fly at sea,' he says. He has the same spark in his eyes as his colleague, and on a day like today, it's little wonder.
This morning, we're both dressed in drysuits and life vests for another first: a heli-landing on a frontier of Nansen Island, a moment's whirl from the continental ice sheet. Ultramarine's captain has anchored in ice-clogged Foyn Harbour, and, as Jonny puts it, he is now twitching 'like a hawk ready to pounce.'
It's the first time any polar operator will attempt to touch ground here; as with every voyage, new landing sites are mapped and every flight trajectory is scrutinised to minimise wildlife disturbances. As we surge above the bay, whale shadows in elegant slow motion emerge like pools of oil. Then, a dorsal fin's splash and one is a little more than a plume of sea spray.
The thrill of being airborne is not merely the sublime views it offers. It is that every flight has a minimal environmental impact. Like many travellers, I'm worried about the scale of the carbon impact of tourism – yet I learn the helicopter's burn rate is 7kg of fuel per person, compared to 10,000 times that for a London-New York flight. Besides this, the H145 uses a third less fuel than similar-sized aircraft. When they are manoeuvring off the vessel, with little deck vibration, the rotors create half the noise pollution of a regular chopper.
After the strapping of seatbelts and adjusting of headsets, there is the whirr of blades and jitter of landing skids, as they catch and ride out onto the wind. Sat in the cockpit, I realise no other flight will ever quite dull the thrill of what I'm seeing: cathedral-like mountains, wide-open ice fields, ribbed crevasses, skuas flying through white light, floating like angels.
Too soon, we land in a flurry of snow where several expedition guides have already alighted and set up a temporary base for another adventure: the experience of crunching through snow over a newfound, uncharted hunk of land. Our round trip takes a couple of hours, and glimpsing this side of Antarctica, so long unseen, is to feel like a visionary explorer. Much like a Shackleton or Scott of the skies.
Again, there's that sparkle in Jonny's eyes as we return to the ship. 'What an absolute privilege,' he says. Then with a small smile: 'We wouldn't want to be anywhere else, would we?'
When I now think of Antarctica, I won't think of the vast penguin rookeries or orcas breaching at dawn, but of the unbroken snow and profound stillness I encounter once the helicopter has left us behind, my senses alive. What does it feel like? For dreamers and romantics, you'll take as many photographs as you can, with long lenses and smartphones but also your eyes, and the most memorable part isn't the take-off or welcome safety of landing back on the aft heli deck. It is when the ship vanishes from view, behind an unnamed summit, and all of Antarctica unfolds before you, extreme, harsh and unforgiving, but intensely beautiful and moving for it all the same.
There, in that fragile emptiness, the real beauty shines.
Essentials
Mike MacEacheran was a guest of Quark Expeditions, which has the 12-day Antarctica by Helicopter: Icebergs, Mountains & Remote Lands cruise costs from £10,495pp, with four departures in November 2025 to December 2026. Price includes two helicopter flightseeing adventures and one helicopter excursion, return charter flights from Buenos Aires to Ushuaia, full-board accommodation and transfers. Excludes international flights.