U.S. Pilot Stranded in Antarctica Says It’s ‘Isolating and Lonely’

Breakfast consists of bread and a teaspoon of butter. For lunch and dinner, it’s beans, lentil soup or pasta. Home is a single room in a Chilean air force barracks, with a spotty Wi-Fi connection. He has only been outside, he said, for an hour over the last six weeks, and he has lost 20 pounds.

Ethan Guo, a 20-year-old American pilot and content creator, said on Wednesday that he has been effectively trapped at a Chilean base on King George Island off Antarctica since June 28, when the Chilean authorities detained him there and accused him of landing his single-engine Cessna there without authorization.

This week, a Chilean judge approved a deal in which prosecutors agreed to dismiss the case against Mr. Guo if he pays $30,000 to a children’s cancer charity and does not re-enter Chile for the next three years. But the central question remains: How will Mr. Guo get off King George Island, roughly 75 miles off the coast of Antarctica?

It is winter in the Southern Hemisphere, and the island is a crusted, windswept landscape of ice and snow. Temperatures have been well below freezing, with frequent snow showers. Chilean officials said it would be unsafe for Mr. Guo to fly to South America over the Drake Passage, the treacherous body of water between Chile and Antarctica known for rough weather and poor visibility. A Chilean air force plane crashed over the Drake Passage in 2019, killing 38 people.

Chilean officials have said that commercial airline service to the island will not resume until winter ends.

In a statement on Wednesday, Chile’s aviation authority said that Mr. Guo was free to leave the island as soon as he could finance a trip on a Chilean ship or arrange a flight to Punta Arenas, on the southern tip of Chile.

But the aviation authority said Mr. Guo cannot fly his own Cessna off the island because it has expired life rafts and life jackets and lacks an anti-icing system. In addition, “there is no certainty that the remaining fuel on the aircraft will be enough to reach the city of Punta Arenas,” about six hours away, the agency said.

Mr. Guo said he does not want to leave the island without his Cessna and believes the plane is in good condition with enough fuel to reach South America.

“It’s very hard and it’s really isolating and lonely,” he said via Zoom. “That means, like solitude — like, you know, confined solitude.”

Mr. Guo had been on a mission to fly to all seven continents. He was hoping to raise $1 million for cancer research and was documenting his travels on Instagram, where he has 1.4 million followers. He began the trip in Memphis on May 31, 2024, he said. His Instagram videos chronicle misadventures like engine troubles, storms and his brief detention in Myanmar, as well as happy moments posing next to the pyramids in Egypt and flying over picturesque lakes in Switzerland.

Antarctica was the only continent he had not landed on when he took off from Punta Arenas on June 28. He was planning to fly to Ushuaia, in southern Argentina, he said.

Instead, he landed hundreds of miles away at Teniente Rodolfo Marsh Martin Airport, a Chilean airfield on King George Island. Chilean officials detained him there and accused him of submitting a “false flight plan” that he never intended to take and of landing without authorization. They said his actions jeopardized public safety.

Mr. Guo disputed that accusation.

He said that after he took off from Punta Arenas before sunrise, the instruments that allowed him to navigate in the dark began malfunctioning. Ice began forming on his plane, making it harder to fly. He lost communication with air traffic controllers, he said. And he began to lose airspeed. He flew over the ocean to avoid hitting mountains and headed for Antarctica, which he said was the closest place to land.

“I was like, ‘I don’t care what’s going to happen,’” Mr. Guo said. “Like, this is an emergency. I need to get down.”

Fire trucks surrounded his plane after it landed, he said, and he was stunned to see “a bunch of dudes just pull up in black suits” and tell him that he was being detained at Chile’s outpost on the island, President Eduardo Frei Montalva Base. As his case played out in a Chilean court, he appeared before a judge via Zoom.

Mr. Guo said that life on the island had been difficult.

He cannot leave the base without an escort, he said, and does not speak much Spanish, although his Chilean hosts have been teaching him the language. “Mostly swear words, though,” he said, with a chuckle.

The Wi-Fi can be unreliable, he said, making it hard to communicate with family in the United States at times. When he turned 20 last month, his Chilean hosts on the base brought him pieces of chocolate and a “small makeshift” cake, he said.

“But I am really, really grateful for it,” he said.

On Monday, a Chilean judge approved the deal to dismiss the case after Mr. Guo’s lawyers gave prosecutors flight records, air traffic control recordings and other evidence to substantiate Mr. Guo’s account. The file included a screenshot of a WhatsApp chat that, the lawyers said, shows a Chilean aviation official replying “yes” with a thumbs-up emoji when Mr. Guo asked if he could land at the airfield on King George Island.

Mr. Guo said he was relieved that the case had been resolved, but frustrated that it took so long. He said he just wants to fly off the island and return to Memphis, where his saga began more than a year ago.

“I’m fighting for my right to fly,” Mr. Guo said. “I’m fighting for my right to continue this mission to raise $1 million.” But he added, “Nothing is concrete yet.”