Mission Greenland: Day 3-4, In the Arctic Circle

As Nuuk experiences unseasonable Arctic Circle Weather, the north-central village of Ilulissat on Disko Bay experiences sunny weather, and reveals how Icebergs could foil Trump's plans.

Photo: Air Greenland Dash-8 flies over the coast between Sisimiut and Nuuk. Ice and Arctic water is all that exists there. (Photo: Malcolm Nance)

I’m off to Ilulisaat, the Arctic Circle's primary hub town. The conditions to get to Nuuk airport were abysmal, as seen in the attached video. A late-winter blizzard was coming into the capital with heavy gusting winds. The airport had already cancelled several flights. I chanced to look at the flight schedule again and found, to my surprise, that the one flight taking off was going to Aasiyut, a small town near my destination of Ilulissat. The Danish weather app showed Ilulisaat was clear and sunny, unlike Nuuk. This is the story of Greenland. The weather is so changeable that they jokingly refer to Air Greenland as Maybe Airlines. Maybe you will fly, maybe you won’t. Mother Nature makes the choice.

My friend Orla Joelson picked me up in high gusting snow and drove me to the airport. Many people were there and I found that my flight was good to go. When I got down to the duty-free waiting area, I discovered that conditions had calmed enough for the Copenhagen flight to take off, and many people hurried to get on it. There were way more people leaving than arriving, and they all looked like Danes. For my flight on a small propeller-driven Dash-8, the entire complement was Greenlandic Inuit heading to the north central villages above the Arctic Circle. In the middle of them was me … the ex-Black Spy. And obviously an American.