20-year-old American pilot Ethan Guo has finally settled his legal dispute with the Chilean government, surrounding his time being effectively stranded on King George Island off the coast of Antarctica. He’s been stuck there since June 28, when he was forced to land his Cessna at a Chilean military base after drifting off course. Chilean prosecutors alleged that this was no innocent example of getting lost, but an intentional attempt to skirt a variety of national and international laws regarding travel to the southernmost continent. He’s now living on the base watched over by soldiers who don’t speak much English. By the way, this is all for children’s cancer research. It’s pretty wild.
Guo has been flying a mission he calls the Flight Against Cancer for the past year. This is a fundraising effort inspired by his cousin, who was diagnosed in 2021. The plan was for Guo, who was 19 at the time that he began the trip, to “become the first person in history to fly solo to all seven continents in a small aircraft and raise $1 million for cancer research.” The money would go to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
That all sounds pretty nice! The trouble, it appears, stems from that “all seven continents” bit. Getting to Antarctica is notoriously tricky, especially in the hemisphere’s winter months, when even emergency medical military flights can only barely make it through. Besides, flying to the farthest south is heavily regulated; you can’t just pop over when you feel like it, even if you have your own plane. So if you’ve promised the internet that you’re going to fly there, what are you to do?
Just slightly off course
According to CBS News, Guo had already been to all of the other six continents, so he only had one particularly cold one left. He was in Punta Arenas at the very southern end of Chile. Guo claims that his flight plan was to go to nearby Ushuaia in Argentina; later, Chilean prosecutors would claim that the flight plan was actually just to circle the first city and land right back in Punta Arenas, per the New York Times.
Now, I don’t have any crystal balls, but I do have eyeballs. The picture above shows the relative positions of Punta Arenas (top dot), Ushuaia (middle dot), and King George Island (bottom dot). Guo’s claim is that instrumentation failure and “weather conditions” meant that he had to “divert” to the military base on the island. Just looking at the map, that is… quite a diversion. It’s 611 linear miles from Ushuaia, and of course, because the Earth is round, a flight path would arc slightly longer.
Free to leave, but can’t anyway
Whether Guo got legitimately lost or intentionally broke the law to hit his seven-continent goal, he was immediately arrested on the base, per a separate NYT article. Chilean authorities later cleared him to leave the island, but not Chilean territory. Trick is, there’s no easy way to get off the island in winter months, so he’s essentially been stranded on the base ever since.
It appears as though Chile wants to wash its hands of this situation. The deal it’s just cut with Guo and his lawyers is that the charges will be dropped provided he pay for the cost of housing him and his plane on the base, donate $30,000 to a children’s cancer charity, and get out of Chile and not come back for three years. In other words, pay up and get out, and help the kids along the way.
A happy ending? Well, Chile’s not clearing the Cessna for flight, and Guo doesn’t want to leave it. And anyway, nobody explained the legal resolution to the weather, which remains as harsh as ever. Guo will probably have to wait for the southern summer months to leave. In the meantime, donating to cancer research is a good idea and you should probably do it. Just maybe don’t try to fly to Antarctica in the process.
