Jetrader - Summer 2014 - 48

aviation history

Early Polar Aviation
Part Two, The North Pole at Last ... But Who Was First?
By Jack Feir, Administrative Director, ISTAT Appraisers' Program

Prologue
The first part of the story about reaching the North Pole by aircraft appeared in
the Spring 2014 issue of Jetrader. It discussed some of the brave but unsuccessful
expeditions, most notably those by Roald
Amundsen and Lincoln Ellsworth that nearly
ended disastrously in 1924 and 1925.

1926, A Busy Spring
at Kings Bay
In the spring of 1926, things became
both interesting and exciting at Kings Bay
in Spitsbergen. Amundsen and a group of
Norwegians had moved in to set up a base
camp for a new attempt to fly to the North
Pole. Having nearly perished in their 1925
attempt to reach the pole with Dornier-Wal
flying boats, his new attempt would be in
a lighter-than-air dirigible.
Arrangements for the flight were
fraught with political hazards. From the
outset, Amundsen viewed the enterprise
as his and Ellsworth's only. The airship had
been purchased from the Italian government with money raised by Amundsen,
Ellsworth and the Aero Club of Norway.
To Mussolini's chagrin, at the handover
ceremony in Rome the airship's name was
changed from N-1 to Norge and the Italian
flag was replaced with the flag of Norway.
Umberto Nobile, while still a colonel in
the Italian air force, was hired to be the
pilot under the command of Amundsen. A
majority of the crew would be Norwegians,
not Italians, and Amundsen would be the
official discoverer of any new lands found
by the expedition. The only concession
Amundsen yielded was to name the expedition the Amundsen-Ellsworth-Nobile
Transpolar Flight.
At Kings Bay, the Norwegians busied
themselves with getting fuel and provisions
for the flight and erected a mooring mast

and a large, barn-like storage hangar for
the airship. Nobile and his Italian crew were
en route, stopping at Leningrad to wait for
Amundsen's signal that all was ready and
the weather was favorable.
Then a black ship came slowly over
the Kings Bay horizon. The U.S. Navy had
arrived in the form of Commander Richard
E. Byrd with a crew of men and a crated
Fokker Trimotor aircraft. The operation was
not really a U.S. Navy affair, however. The
ship was not the Navy's, and most of the
sailors were volunteers granted furloughs
from the Navy to take part in the expedition. Funding for food, fuel and supplies
was primarily raised by Byrd's own efforts,
with one of the major donors being Edsel
Ford, who covered most of the cost for the
Fokker Trimotor. As recognition, the aircraft
was named the Josephine Ford after Edsel's
daughter.
The Norwegian dock workers were
not amused at this American intrusion.
They refused permission for the U.S. ship
to unload at the dock, so the Americans
dropped anchor in the bay and improvised
a raft from four of the ship's lifeboats
with the Fokker set on top. Seamen rowed
and poled the raft through broken ice
and dragged the aircraft onto the beach.
Meanwhile Byrd had gone ashore and
introduced himself to Amundsen who was
somewhat magnanimous, describing their
respective teams not as competitors, but
as partners on the same quest. He even
suggested that Byrd's men could create a
runway on the snow directly through the
middle of the Norwegians' camp and take
off from there.
Among Amundsen's team was a young
flight lieutenant, Bernt Balchen, who had
been assigned by the Royal Norwegian Air
Force in 1925 to fly search missions for
the Amundsen-Ellsworth expedition that

48 The ofﬁcial publication of the International Society of Transport Aircraft Trading

had failed to reach the pole. He was now
expecting to be assigned a crew position on
the Norge flight, but Amundsen suggested
Balchen might be able to help prepare
Byrd's aircraft. In fact, the Byrd expedition would probably have foundered right
there if Balchen had not assisted them.
Balchen saw the Byrd team was applying wax to the Fokker's skis. He told them
the skis were too small, and they should
leave off the wax and adopt the Norwegian
practice of using pine tar and resin, burned
into the wood with a blowtorch. Ignoring
his advice, they tried to make a test hop.
With the Fokker's engines roaring, the
small, waxed skis stuck to the snow until
one broke away and the aircraft slowed to
a stop. They had a spare set of skis back
on the ship, but of the same inadequate
design, and there was no lumber on hand to
make new skis. Balchen suggested they get
some of the oars from the ship's lifeboats,
so an armload of oars was brought ashore
and taken to the Norwegians' workshop
and soon crafted into a new set of skis.
Meanwhile the Norge airship arrived from
Leningrad; the race was on.

The Byrd/Bennett Flight
Around noon the next day (8 May 1926),
Byrd and his pilot, Floyd Bennett, climbed
into the Josephine Ford and started the
engines, but the aircraft barely moved
and then came to a halt. Balchen, who
was practically born with skis, knew why.
It was a mild day and by noon the snow
had turned sticky; he suggested they wait
until midnight when it would be colder. Of
course, "midnight" at Spitsbergen in May
is a relative thing, since the sun never
really sets then, but it does get low on
the horizon and temperatures can fall well
below the freezing point where the snow
develops an icy crust. A few minutes after
Jetrader - Summer 2014

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