Greenland’s special brand of weirdness, part one: Air Transport

There’s a lot of weirdness in Greenland. Some of it is funny. Some of it is sad. Some of it is just weird. Here are some air transport-related snippets.

1. The Camp Raven airstrip on the Greenland icecap, close to the site of the Dye-2 base, is a training airstrip for C-130 aircraft landings and acts as an emergency landing strip for aircraft flying over Greenland. It has never been used for emergency landings. The Dye-2 site was originally part of the DEW Line, the American long range radar early warning system set up during the Cold War. The strip is maintained year-round by two people, stationed for long periods. It is literally in the middle of nowhere.
2. The longest road in Greenland is about twenty-five kilometres and runs from the international airport at Kangerlussuaq to the inland ice. The road was completed in 2001 by a car testing company who planned to fly Volkswagon test vehicles to the airport, drive them up to the ice, and test them – in secrecy – on a track on the ice. The project was canned in 2006. But you can still fly in to Greenland and drive up to the edge of the ice cap.
3. Until the early 1970s in Narsarsuaq, South Greenland, and until just a few years ago in Kangerlussuaq, west Greenland, the ruins of large US military hospitals still stood. These were once manned by hundreds of staff to treat sick and dying Americans soldiers who were flown in for treatment, rather than being flown directly home, during the Second World War and the Korean war.
4. A couple of years ago in Nuuk, a mentally ill man started firing a rifle in the street because he wasn’t able to get psychiatric help through the health system in Nuuk and he figured this was a sure fire way (no pun intended) to receive treatment. The Greenland-based Danish police decided they needed backup and so a Hercules aircraft was flown from Denmark to Nuuk carrying specialised police vehicles. It is a four and a half flight from Copenhagen to Nuuk and that’s in an Airbus 330. A Hercules flies significantly slower. The airstrip in Nuuk is only 35 metres longer than the minimum landing distance for a Hercules. The police got their special ops and the mentally ill man was arrested. I don’t know whether he also got his psychiatric treatment.