I drove Nykolai and his mom out to the airport today for the first leg of their journey to Buenos Aires (thanks to Emmanuel for the use of his car :) From Melbourne they flew up to Sydney via QANTAS then changed to Aerolineas Argentinas for a quick jump across to Auckland. About 9 hours after they left Melbourne, the Aerolineas Argentinas flight left Auckland for a journey of about 16 hours non-stop to Buenos Aires. This flight will take them south to within about 1,000km of the pole, looping down and around on a “great circle” path (the shortest distance between two points on a sphere). From the flight deck on one of these flights you can get a great view of the ice on a clear day, but usually in the cabin the windows are too small to really get much viewing in.
As I type, they’re about an hour outbound from Auckland. Once they arrive at Ezeiza airport in Buenos Aires, they will have spent about 26 hours travelling and have flown about 13,200km. You can get a good representation of their total flight path from start to finish via this Great Circle Mapper page.