There is a moment on the approach to Narsarsuaq where the decision stops being yours. You have turned into the fjord. The water is below, the rock is on both sides, and the channel is too narrow and the walls too high to turn around in. The only way out is forward, to a runway you cannot yet see.

For eighty-four years, pilots flew that approach. On 17 April 2026 the last one did.

Greenland moved its fixed-wing services to a new airport at Qaqortoq the day before, and Bluie West One — the airfield that fed ten thousand aircraft into the war against Germany — became a heliport.

Why Greenland mattered

In 1941 Britain was losing supply ships faster than it could replace them. Aircraft shipped across the Atlantic in crates were being sunk in the crates. The answer was to fly them instead, and flying them meant stepping stones.

There was a second reason, less often told. Southern Greenland held the largest cryolite mine in the world, and cryolite was essential to smelting aluminium. Germany had been interested in it since the 1930s. An aluminium supply is an aircraft industry, and nobody wanted to find out what Germany would do with the mine.

Roosevelt and Churchill settled the arrangement at a secret meeting in Newfoundland. American reconnaissance flights went looking for somewhere in southern Greenland flat enough to build on, which in a country of fjords and ice is a genuinely difficult request. They found one patch of glacial moraine at the head of a navigable fjord, near a tiny settlement called Narsarssuaq.

Construction started in mid-1941 and took a year: a 5,000-foot pierced-steel-mat runway, barracks, a radar station on top of a mountain, and a non-directional beacon on the island of Simiutaq at the fjord mouth so that crews could confirm they were entering the right fjord. A half-sunken freighter provided a mid-fjord checkpoint until it sank completely.

Bluie was the code word for Greenland. West meant the western coast. One meant this was the southernmost of the airfields. Bluie West Eight, built by October 1941 some 250 miles north, is the field the Danish F-35s landed at last week — today it is called Kangerlussuaq.

Ten thousand aircraft

The route ran Presque Isle in Maine, Goose Bay in Labrador, Bluie West One, then Reykjavik or Keflavik, then Prestwick in Scotland — with no single leg longer than about 850 miles. It was built so that single-engine fighters could cross an ocean.

In mid-June 1942 Major General Carl Spaatz radioed from Bluie West One, mid-crossing, and ordered the Eighth Air Force movement to Britain to begin. P-38s and P-39s went over shepherded by longer-legged B-17s. Four thousand troops were stationed at BW-1 at its peak. An Army hospital arrived in 1943.

The tugboat and the icebergs

The base did not stop being strange after the war. The USAF kept it through the early Cold War as a refuelling station for jet fighters and helicopters crossing the Atlantic, and paved the runway in concrete.

Jets need a longer take-off run than propeller aircraft, and take-offs at Narsarsuaq are made westward, out over the basin. So the base kept a small tugboat whose job was to push icebergs out of the way of departing aircraft.

Aerial refuelling and the opening of Thule in the far north eventually made BW-1 redundant. It was handed to the Danish government of Greenland in 1958 and carried on as a civil airport, with a 6,000-foot paved runway, serving Air Greenland and — crucially for a certain kind of aviator — light aircraft crossing the Atlantic.

The approach from the cockpit of a King Air, which is the clearest way to understand why this airfield had a reputation.

A rite of passage, and a long list of reasons not to

Narsarsuaq sits roughly midway between Goose Bay and Reykjavik, which makes it the natural fuel stop for piston singles and twins with ferry tanks and four to seven hours of endurance. Generations of ferry pilots therefore had no realistic alternative.

What they got in exchange: low ceilings, high terrain, minimums around 1,800 feet, high winds, a final approach fix nine miles out, a missed approach point three miles from the threshold, and a missed approach procedure full of tight turns near mountains. The field closed at night and on holidays. You were fined for landing on a Sunday. For a long time there were no terminal forecasts at all, and the weather reports only existed while the tower was open.

The nominated alternate was Kangerlussuaq, 250 miles away, which has better weather and a 9,000-foot runway — and which is a deeply unpleasant leg to contemplate when you are short of fuel.

The last landing

Greenland decided in 2018 to close the field to aeroplanes and build a proper airport at Qaqortoq, 37 nautical miles south and much closer to the people it serves. Qaqortoq has a 4,900-foot runway and terrain that, while not flat, is nothing like the three-thousand-footers wrapped around Narsarsuaq. In October 2025 the layoffs began; around seventy jobs went as the field wound down.

The last aeroplane to land at BGBW, filmed from the cockpit of a Cessna Caravan.

The airfield is still there. The runway is still there. The mountains are certainly still there.

Greenland Airports still points a live camera down the field, which is a peculiar thing to watch: a runway in working order, in daylight, with nothing coming.

Sources: AOPA (Thomas A. Horne, March 2026); Air Force Historical Research Agency; warbirdforum.com (Daniel Ford), including correspondence from Harold Patton and Harold Case; Greenland Airports; Ernest K. Gann, Fate Is the Hunter.