It can take up to 40 tonnes of diesel fuel to keep an 85-kilogram scientist alive over winter in parts of Antarctica and as much as another 10 tonnes of building materials, machinery, supply depots and provisions per person per year.

These alarming estimates, detailed in US reports into the sustainability of its Antarctic programme, are based on around 15 tonnes of actual heating fuel needs on the ice and more than half again as much just transporting the fuel by tankers escorted by energy hungry ice breakers.

Of course these tankers can't buy fuel in Antarctica, so they also have to carry enough for their return, adding to the dismal arithmetic of burning huge amounts of fuel to deliver a fraction of the original amount to a remote and ferociously cold destination.

What fuel actually ends up being available for the scientists may then require shuttle missions of up to 2500 kilometres return by air just to keep people alive at remote stations, as well as melt the dozens of litres of ice needed to make one litre of fresh water.

Which is why the lonely flight of an ex-Air France Airbus A319 from Hobart, Tasmania, recently was of such importance to Australia and the other Antarctica Treaty nations seeking greener supply lines for their polar scientists.

The jet flew for five hours against headwinds before passing over the hardest, coldest and most desolate looking runway ever built for your everyday average airliner.

But it did not land. This medium sized jet that is a common sight at the world's airports was too late for its initially intended date with south polar history.

It has been bought by Australia's Antarctic Division to bring the age of "normal" jet services to the bitterly hostile seventh continent and dramatically reduce the environmental impact of doing climate-change research.

This particular A319 has additional fuel tanks. While it could normally carry up to 150 people in service with a low cost carrier, it will carry up to 40 people to the Antarctic Blue Ice runway, plus 50 kilograms of freight or luggage per person, with enough fuel for the entire 7000 kilometres return trip.

The first flight, at the end of the southern polar summer, was planned for early February, but the paperwork to transfer it from being a French to Australian registered plane took longer than anticipated.

By the time the research division took delivery, the midnight sun at what is called the Sir Hubert Wilkins Blue Ice runway, 70 kilometres inland from Australia's Casey base, was turning into rapidly lengthening pools of midnight darkness, and the last days of summer were plummeting toward the -50C to -80C (and sometimes even colder) range that will persist across the vast interior of Antarctica until late October.

Yet the personnel at the Antarctic Division say success is assured, when the light returns, and temperatures soar back to somewhere near zero.

Division officials say the flights will allow researchers to accomplish in between as little as a few weeks or a month work that otherwise would have required an ocean voyage of at least 10 days one way, and heating and other infrastructure support for anything between one month or even "wintering over", which can mean eight months in extreme cases.

The net savings in fuel consumption will lower dramatically the fossil fuel emissions per researcher, as well as produce urgently sought answers to questions about Antarctica's role in natural and man made climate change more rapidly.

The director of the division Dr Tony Press, and his new minister, Malcolm Turnbull, say the runway's entry into service later this year is timely because of the unprecedented scope of the multinational research effort involved in the International Polar Year of 2007 to 2008.

They expect the Wilkins runway, which is 4,000 metres long and carved out of rock hard ice to be used as a 'hub' for aerial supply flights by other treaty nations.

The jets will off load cargo to be distributed to other bases and field locations by smaller ski-equipped turboprops.

In fact the runway is capable of handling the largest and heaviest airliners built, including freighter versions of the Boeing 747, but with one limitation.

Refuelling is banned at Wilkins to eliminate any risk of a spill. Jets will have to arrive with enough fuel to return to the nearest suitable airport, which is Hobart, closely followed by Melbourne in South Australia.

And the flying will be demanding as Wilkins has no landing aids. Wilkins is all about eyeball skills and experience in the treacherous phenomenon of a "white out", when a jet seems to be suspended in a place with no horizons and no perspectives indeed nothing but white light.

It is the sort of place the real Sir Hubert Wilkins, adventurer and polar aviator would have liked.

Wilkins, born 1888, escaped from a hard farming upbringing in South Australia to go adventuring abroad. After taking a travelling movies show to Eskimos, he embarked on pioneering expeditions in both the Arctic and Antarctic, being knighted for piloting the first trans-Arctic flight in 1928. He was a war correspondent, a cinematographer and leader of anthropological expeditions to the tropics.

In 1931 he tried to take a submarine the Nautilus to the North Pole, an heroic failure which the US Navy honoured by scattering his ashes at his goal when the nuclear submarine Skate finally succeeded in making the voyage in 1959, less than a year after his death.

Ben Sandilands

The Observer

Canberra