Northeast Greenland – the arrival.

Our arrival in Danish military base, Daneborg, was not fun. Daneborg is seventy-four degrees north, in northeast Greenland. To get there we flew from Iceland on a forty-seater Dash-8 aircraft to the gravel airstrip at Constable Point, the official point of entry into the Northeast Greenland National Park – the largest national park in the world. Constable Point has a hangar and a small building that can hold a couple of dozen waiting passengers, and which has a few basic rooms for the ground crew and anyone who gets stranded by weather, which happens. There is often fog in the summer and when it rains heavily, the airstrip can be too wet to land. It’s not an airport where you want to be stranded. Desolate would be an appropriate word.

From Constable Point we flew by Twin Otter for another hour and a half to Daneborg.

“What’s a Twin Otter?” asked my son, overhearing me talking on the phone to my husband from Constable Point.
“Two otters stuck together,” he replied, without taking a breath. My son seemed satisfied with this.

That’s not what Twin Otters are. Twin Otters are the workhorses of Arctic travel. For decades these tough little planes have been transporting people and cargo to all sorts of makeshift airstrips in inhospitable locales across Arctic Canada and Greenland. They can carry twelve passengers and lots of cargo. They fly slowly. Their engines roar almost as loudly inside as out. But they will fly through seriously tough conditions and they will land on tiny rock, gravel, and ice airstrips – or no airstrip at all.

Coming in to land in a Twin Otter is a bit nerve-wracking at the best of times. The airstrip always looks too short before the plane stops dead in what seems an unfeasibly short distance. But our landing at Daneborg was seriously not fun.

For starters, the wind was blowing over thirty knots. Then, during the descent, the turbulence set in. The plane bounced more and more violently until we were all drawing sharp breaths and gripping the seat ahead. The short gravel airstrip, visible between the pilots through the front windscreen, seemed to be closing too fast. As we crossed from above the fjord to over the beach, the airstrip now just ahead, shear winds struck, thrusting the tail left to right. The ground loomed dramatically close. I wanted to close my eyes but they remained fixed on the jerky movements of the horizon ahead. An alarm blared through the cabin. My colleague beside me said something to me and laughed, but I stared grimly ahead, unable to even acknowledge her. With the wheels now only metres from the ground, still we powered forward with roaring engines, the end of the runway approaching, beyond which I could see the frozen fjord. Just one metre from the ground, a gust blasted the plane five metres back into the air. Frantically, the pilots jammed on the acceleration, we were thrown back in our seats and soared skyward. To my simultaneous relief and dismay, we turned for a second attempt.

The second was very much like the first, but without the final heart-stopping moments, and then the wheels hit the gravel. The engines powered down and I felt a wave of nausea as we ground to a sudden halt. We had arrived.