• You know who has a cool job? Jonathan Mutch, who's a helicopter pilot in Antarctica.
• He lands on helipads made of ice and has to navigate rapidly changing weather conditions.
• Flightseeing is included in select Antarctic itineraries, which start at a whopping $20,000 a person.

Quark Expeditions helicopter pilot Jonathan Mutch is working his fifth season in Antarctica, flying high-paying tourists to some of the planet's most remote places.

Mutch told Business Insider that flying helicopters across the seventh continent is no easy feat.

It takes a team of pilots, flight engineers, mountain guides, and expedition leaders to run the operation safely. Quark says it has strict environmental parameters to avoid affecting wildlife.

He said that because Antarctic weather can be harsh and unpredictable, guests must have realistic and flexible expectations.

"It's a lot more complicated than it looks," Mutch said. "We'll start with a study of our maps and charts and previous experience with the weather, and we'll brief over the preceding days."

Helicopter flightseeing excursions are included in all Antarctic itineraries on the Ultramarine, the luxury vessel where Quark guests live during their voyage and where the helicopters take off and land.

Mutch said Quark prioritizes getting everybody a 15-minute flightseeing trip, followed by potential landings.

Pricing for the 2026-2027 season starts at about $20,000 per person and includes flightseeing, meals, housing, and other activities. Helicopter landings are $995 extra.

Deep-pocketed tourists can also pay $30,000 or more per person for a more helicopter-focused tour that includes landing near an Emperor penguin colony.

Helicopter flying is different in Antarctica

Mutch said Quark has two Airbus-made H145 helicopters, which are fitted with safety technology for polar operations, such as two redundant engines and an advanced autopilot.

The helicopters are stored and maintained in hangars atop the ship. Here, guests board and disembark, the aircraft are refueled between trips, and the crew plans flights.

Mutch said both helicopters are needed to prep the landing sites before taking passengers. Pilots and engineers ensure that things like lighting and recirculating snow won't affect safety or visibility.

Jake Morrison, senior director of expedition operations, told Business Insider that a flightseeing operation requires at least 13 employees, or 20 or more for ice landings.

Experienced mountain guides test the landing ice thickness and ensure the sites are safe for walking and void of crevasses.

"We won't get airborne if the experience is going to be lackluster or if there's any risk of leaving anybody out there," Mutch said. He added that Quark operates to the same standards as airlines and that the ships' crew will always track the helicopter's location.

Mutch said Quark pilots are trained beyond minimum standards, including twice a year in a flight simulator, and have a background in complicated flying.

"We'll put the aircraft into white-out conditions and test the pilots' decision-making," Mutch said, speaking about the simulator training. "We want guys who are not going to be too proud [that causes them] to push on and make mistakes."

There are environmental considerations

Flying carbon-emitting helicopters across Antarctica will impact the environment, but Quark said it does what it can to minimize its footprint.

Morisson said the H145 helicopters are more fuel-efficient and quieter than similar aircraft in their category.

Mutch said flightseeing tours are intended to show the landscape, so pilots will not fly within a mile of wildlife. The flight-following crew on the ship helps maintain distance.

When he performs Emperor penguin landings, Mutch said there is typically an iceberg between the birds and humans, so Quark guests are "virtually inaudible and invisible."

"The last thing we want to do is change the behavior of any wildlife or interact in any way with the wildlife down here, whether it be penguins, seals, sea birds, or whales," Mutch said. "We explain this to passengers when we board."

These are necessary considerations as Antarctic conservation is a hot topic. A record-breaking number of tourists visit the continent: About 120,000 people visited during the 2025-2026 season, up from about 100,000 the year before.

As ice levels decrease, wildlife is at risk of pollutants from ships, aircraft, and humans. A September 2026 study interviewed 25 former Antarctic tour guides who said they left the industry after facing a moral conflict between their jobs and their concerns about environmental and wildlife harm.

The International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators, an Antarctic advocacy group, responded, saying the points were valid and should be heard, but they may not represent the views of the over 6,600-person guiding community on Antarctica. IAATO added that tourism helps educate and advocate for conservation, and the agency tries to curb risks by limiting the number of people on the continent at any given time.

Visitors should have realistic expectations

The weather will determine whether a flight can operate safely, so there are some days when a tour is scheduled but cannot fly — meaning guests must prepare for uncertainty and possible disappointment.

It's easy to get frustrated considering the high cost of the tour, but that's the reality of flying in the polar south.

"We're quite conservative about when we fly, but we'd ideally want a blue-sky day," he said, adding the company completes an average of 200 flights per season. "We'd like to fly three or perhaps four times per trip, but it's really what the weather will allow us."

Most people do get the chance to fly over Antarctica, thanks to long itineraries and a variety of destination options.

The single-pilot flightseeing tours carry up to six passengers, with everyone getting a window seat. To optimize capacity, landings will carry up to nine, as prime seating is unnecessary.

"There's Fournier Bay on Anvers Island, an amphitheater of steep ice cliffs, and if we can get above the ridge, you can see up to 100 miles of the Antarctic Peninsula on a clear day," Mutch said, speaking about his favorite sites. "It's not unusual to have guests welling up, overwhelmed with emotion."

• Pilots have faced the risk of deskilling for decades because of their reliance on autopilot.
• Steven Shaw of King's College London said they can show workers how to stay sharp with AI.
• "Even experts are at risk of deskilling," he said.

Pilots have relied on autopilot for decades. Their experience could offer a lesson for workers increasingly relying on AI.

Steven Shaw, an assistant professor at King's College London and coauthor of a widely cited study on "cognitive surrender," drew a parallel between pilots' reliance on automation and workers outsourcing their thinking and delegating their work to AI.

"We've had autopilot in planes for a very, very long time," Shaw said, speaking at a recent OxGen Summit panel. "So they learn to fly manually first, and then they learn to use autopilot strategically."

Some federal aviation guidance encourages pilots to occasionally switch off autopilot to maintain their manual flying skills.

There is a long track record of this. In a 2013 safety alert, the Federal Aviation Administration warned that "continuous use of autoflight systems could lead to degradation of the pilot's ability to quickly recover the aircraft from an undesired state."

The agency reiterated the importance of manual flying in a 2017 alert, recommending that airlines encourage pilots to practice without autopilot periodically when conditions permit.

"Even experts are at risk of deskilling," Shaw said, referring to the dangers of repeatedly outsourcing cognitive tasks to AI.

Shaw's warning comes as some tech leaders, AI researchers, and politicians have cautioned that overreliance on AI could weaken workers' underlying cognitive abilities.

Speaking at More Perfect University's "Students vs. Billionaires" town hall in Maine on Thursday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warned that "AI's goal is to take your thoughts away from you, your ability to think away from you so that you become dependent on a machine."

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in July that one of AI's most overlooked risks was "cognitive atrophy," while Arthur Mensch, CEO of French AI startup Mistral, said last year that the technology's biggest risk could be "deskilling."

Think before you prompt

Early research is showing how readily people outsource their thinking to AI.

Vivienne Ming, an AI researcher and theoretical neuroscientist, told Business Insider in March that one of her experiments, involving 72 participants, found that roughly 90% to 95% either relied on AI to generate answers or used it to validate their assumptions, rather than challenge and deepen their thinking.

"The overwhelming trend is substitution," she said.

Similarly, Shaw's research suggests that the danger is that people increasingly accept AI's answers without thinking critically.

In experiments involving 1,372 participants, people accepted AI recommendations nearly 80% of the time even when the answers were deliberately incorrect.

Shaw calls this phenomenon "cognitive surrender."

His advice for avoiding it is straightforward: develop your own judgment before asking AI for help.

"Just think first and then go to the prompt," he said during the OxGen Summit panel.

Starting with AI, he warned, can narrow the range of ideas people consider independently.

Other experts have offered similar advice. Geetha Rajan, a former AI adoption leader at PwC, previously told Business Insider that she writes her own first drafts before using AI to check facts and challenge her work.

Ryan Deiss, CEO of DigitalMarketer, advocates a "10-80-10" rule: humans handle the first 10% of a task, AI takes on the middle 80%, and humans return for the final 10% to exercise judgment and refine the result.

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