The world’s first glacier airport

Imagine building an airport where only one single plane would land….. The Germans did just that on the 1800 meter high Hardanger glacier in 1940. Hitler got the crazy idea that having an airport at elevation would give the German aircraft bombers, not only a chance to save precious fuel, but also the significant advantage of being able to land between the mountains on their way to bomb northern Norway. They collected the best engineers in Germany and created a top secret project to build an airport. A glacier is mostly flat when you look at it from above and is made from quite hard material. The work soon proved to be very demanding for both the German soldiers and the Norwegian sympathisers who were working on the project. Neither the weather nor the ice behaved as they hoped they would, but in the space of 8 months the 1 km long landing strip was complete. But it went horribly wrong when the first test flight came into land. It of course crashed and the propellers were buried in the ice, making it both the first and last flight that landed at the airport.