What it takes to land a plane on a runway made entirely of ice

As he descended between snow-covered hills in New Hampshire, Larry Gurgainous tensed up. The U.S. Air Force veteran had piloted military aircraft in Afghanistan and Iraq. He’d flown a small plane around Niagara Falls and Mount Rushmore. But he’d never attempted to land without braking.

After a three-hour flight from Virginia, he was fast approaching a novel destination: a narrow strip of ice on the southernmost tip of Lake Winnipesaukee. Workers had recently cleared a nearly 3,000-foot-long, hundred-foot-wide runway on the frozen inlet, and aviation enthusiasts had been converging on the cove ever since to see and experience an unusual feat of flight.

Gurgainous surveyed the crowded bay below. Cars, trucks, and ice fishing bob-houses lined one side of the strip, while two rows of parked planes sat at its foot. Other small aircraft took off and taxied as Gurgainous approached. It would be a tight landing. 

The pilot tried to focus on his speed and target. For the past week, he’d practiced techniques to navigate the unique runway. But he knew nothing could quite prepare him for landing on ice. Brakes wouldn’t work well, if at all, on the slippery surface, so he couldn’t come in too hot—or too close to the snowbanks framing the runway. One plane had crashed in 2025 after clipping a drift. (No injuries were reported.) Gurgainous kept his eyes fixed on the runway.

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His Beechcraft Sierra barely made a sound when it touched the ice. The landing was as smooth, if not smoother, as one on pavement. Even without applying brakes like he usually would, his wheels slowed so much after landing that he had to add power to reach the end of the runway. Only as he rolled down the glazed track did the pilot allow himself to smile and take in the scenery. 

“I felt pretty ready, but I was definitely on my toes,” Gurgainous said shortly after receiving a commemorative chip and certificate for his successful landing at the Alton Bay Seaplane Base and Ice Runway.

Landing on the patch of ice known as B18 has become a bucket-list item for many pilots. While ice runways are common in remote locales across Alaska, the Arctic, and Antarctica, B18 is the only one registered with the Federal Aviation Administration in the continental U.S. It’s accessible for just a few weeks out of the year—if at all. As winters warm and ice melts sooner in New Hampshire, the runway is increasingly at risk of closure, just as it’s taking off.

Aviators from Texas, Florida, and Georgia have all recently flown into Alton Bay. Gurgainous, who lives in Fredericksburg, Virginia, learned about the runway through an online aviation forum. “When this came up,” he says, “it was like, man, we gotta go try this.”

What it takes to land a plane on ice

Planes have landed on Alton Bay since at least the 1940s, when a seaplane owner who lived on the cove began offering rides. Ice landings were a rarity in those early years, though daring trips out onto the frozen lake were not: Automobiles often raced laps around the inlet. 

It wasn’t until the 1960s that the ice runway started to gain traction, says Paul LaRochelle, an Alton town selectman who took over as runway manager around 2009. Still, for decades, B18 remained only a local novelty. 

Not anymore. Touching down on a frozen runway has gotten “astronomically” more popular with pilots around the U.S., says airport manager Jason Leavitt, who oversees all operations at B18 as part of the New Hampshire Department of Transportation. Last year, its workers tallied 764 landings, and the runway has already surpassed that record in 2026. On the Tuesday that Gurgainous touched down in early February, 111 other aircraft did too.

“On a good weekday, typically a Friday, we might see 40,” Leavitt says. “So to see 112 on a Tuesday was a lot.”

Both LaRochelle and Leavitt attribute this rise in air traffic to social media, where pilots frequently post videos of their trips to B18. “It’s just gotten the word out there that this even exists,” Leavitt says.

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All the fly-ins mean that, these days, close observers can credibly claim some improbable—but true—trivia about the ice strip’s flight schedule: “Sometimes, we’re the busiest airport in the state,” says David Shibley, the co-owner of a restaurant, Shibley’s at the Pier, that overlooks the runway. 

Paul Russo, who flies out of Concord, New Hampshire, has had a bird’s-eye view of B18’s growth. The pilot has landed on the ice runway countless times over the past two decades. In mid-January, he told a capacity crowd at the Aviation Museum of New Hampshire that the runway was narrower when he first arrived in 2005. Ice fishermen and other spectators gathered closer to the strip then. “There was a fellow sitting on a snowmobile literally at the runway threshold,” Russo said. 

Landing isn’t as challenging as many first-timers assume, Leavitt says. “The only thing you have to take into consideration is you just don’t have brakes, and even that’s not entirely true, because you do have a little more braking action than you think you do,” Leavitt says. Patches of snow, for instance, can help wheels gain traction.

Taking off can be trickier. While many single-engine pilots are accustomed to pushing the power in quickly at the end of the runway to gain as much speed as possible to lift off, accelerating on ice requires a lighter, more gradual touch, Leavitt says. Otherwise, planes can slide right off the runway. 

How many winters will pilots have left?

More often than pilot error, the weather poses problems. Snowstorms bury the strip, pausing operations for days. And warm temperatures can shut down the runway for an entire season.

In 2023 and 2024, just as it did in 2011, 2016, and 2020, the airport remained closed for the winter because the ice wasn’t thick enough for planes to land. A 12-inch layer of ice must form on the bay before trucks can venture out to plow the strip.

This isn’t as likely as it once was in one of the fastest-warming places on Earth. A recent analysis of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data found that, between 1970 and 2025, average winter temperatures in the Alton Bay area rose by more than 5 degrees Fahrenheit.

“These winters are much milder than they used to be,” says Mary Stampone, an associate professor of geography at the University of New Hampshire and New Hampshire’s state climatologist since 2008. 

As a result, ice is melting sooner in the Lakes Region than ever before. Along Winnipesaukee, locals have long estimated “ice-out,” a subjective measure of when the lake has thawed enough for the lake’s historic cruise ship, the M/S Mount Washington, to reach all its regular stops. The state’s most recent climate assessment determined that, as of 2020, the ice-out date was “occurring on average eight days earlier” than in 1971. The four earliest ice-out dates have all occurred since 2010, including in 2024, when pilots declared the earliest ice-out—March 17—on record.

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The state’s climate assessment didn’t track ice thickness over time, so Stampone, a co-author of the report, can’t project how many winters will reach the runway’s 12-inch threshold in the years ahead—and therefore how many more winters pilots will have the opportunity to land there. She says that the Lakes Region can, however, anticipate more variability—warmer warm periods, for instance, followed by intense cold snaps.

These changes have left many of the area’s winter activities vulnerable to warming and snowpack loss. In this turbulent climate, the area has tried to make the most of classically cold winters. As Shibley sees it, “Mother Nature cooperating is really the most important thing. When the ice is good and thick, and we’ve got plenty of snow, that really brings the people about. But they flock for the runway.”

Finding joy in the spectacle while it lasts

On a Saturday morning when the temperature dropped to six degrees below zero, Chris Rogers drove more than two hours north from his home in Taunton, Massachusetts, to see the first planes of the season land on the ice runway.

Less than a week earlier, a winter storm had dumped nearly two feet of snow on Alton Bay. A skeleton crew that included Leavitt and LaRochelle spent the next few days driving three trucks a collective 200 miles on the frozen lake to plow the half-mile strip and its adjacent taxiway and parking area. 

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Rogers, a photographer, first visited in 2025. He arrived before anyone else this year, making fresh tracks in the snow on his way out to a bandstand that, in summer, floats in the middle of the bay. From this prime viewing spot, he watched the first plane of the day touch down on skis just after 8 a.m. Most of the dozens descending thereafter landed on wheels.

“It’s just amazing that they’re able to stop,” Rogers said, his lens still pointed skyward. 

Hundreds of other spectators soon joined Rogers out on the heavily powdered ice to watch a steady stream of planes, and even a helicopter, touch down. Some observers pulled up in pickup trucks, others on snowmobiles. Many lugged folding chairs and coolers. “Anything aviation, we go to,” said Lusann Wishart, who’d brought her six-year-old, plane-loving grandson, Trip Simmons.

First-timers Denise and Alan Sandler of Litchfield, New Hampshire, reveled in watching planes land so close and seeing a winter tradition endure as the climate changes in their state. Denise, an avid cross-country skier, could only make it out once last year. “It’s a wild card,” Alan said.

The pilots themselves can’t stay in the area long. There’s no safe way to park on the ice overnight, Leavitt says. Many do what Gurgainous and his friend did: grab lunch at one of the several restaurants near the runway before taking off.

He plans to return this season, however long it may last—perhaps with his wife, Amy, who opted not to accompany him on his first ice adventure.

“Now that it’s all over, and I’ve showed her the video, and we’ve all talked about it,” he says, “she’s like, hey, maybe I want to go up there.”