Jetrader - Spring 2014 - 30

aviation history

Early Polar Aviation
Part One: The North Pole Beckons
By Jack Feir, Administrative Director, ISTAT Appraisers' Program

Prologue
"The Arctic trails have their secret tales
that would make your blood run cold."
Robert W. Service.
A century or so ago, the quest for personal and national prestige led individuals
and nations to complete the task of exploring the earth's hitherto unseen north and
south poles. It was a slow, brutal, nasty
and dangerous business, costing the lives
of many brave men and countless numbers
of hapless animals: including mules, ponies
and most of all, dogs.
The North Pole was eventually attained
either in 1908 by Frederick Cook, or in 1909
by Robert Peary, depending on which of the
two you believed was the least unsavory of
two scoundrels.
Cook and two Eskimo comrades unquestionably reached the farthest northern
islands in the Canadian Arctic in the spring
of 1908 and went some distance farther
north from there on the frozen Arctic
Ocean. They nearly perished a half-dozen
times in the year it took them to make
their way back. Cook's original diaries and
navigation records (if they existed) were
never found, so we can never know just
how far north he went. Cook claimed to
have reached the pole, and in view of his
considerable previous experience exploring
the Arctic, and partly because he seemed to
be such a nice, honest guy, it would have
been unseemly to question him too closely
about the details. So, in some quarters, at
least, Cook was credited with being the
first to reach the North Pole.
Peary, on the other hand, was an imperious megalomaniac consumed by his lust for
fame and not such a nice guy. In his quest
for the North Pole, he was a relentless
bear for self-punishment. By 1909, he was
a physical wreck on his eighth attempt to
reach the pole. For him, it was now or never;

failure was unthinkable. Having wintered
over and set up a series of base camps on
Canada's Ellesmere Island, he set off onto
the Arctic Ocean when the sun came back
to the north in the spring of 1909. When
he returned, he claimed to have reached
the pole, but he was the only one in the
small party making the final stage of the
big push to the pole who knew how to use
a sextant and astronomical tables to calculate his position. His "calculated" positions
showed that he made incredible speeds and
distances each day on the last 150 miles to
the pole and 500 miles back to solid ground.
However, it was again unseemly to question
such an honorable gentleman, so his claims
to have reached the pole, together with
his denunciation of Cook, were accepted.
The conventional wisdom seemed to be
that if Cook was a fraud who never reached
the pole, then Peary must surely be the
honest one. Nevertheless, Peary was slow to
produce his calculations. Many years later,
researchers concluded that neither man had
reached the North Pole at all, but in the
meantime, Cook's reputation was destroyed
while Peary died a national hero.
Perhaps the one good outcome of this
unfortunate fiasco was that no more brave
men died trying to be first to reach the pole
with dogs and sledges; most believed that it
already had been done. As it happened, the
first undisputed overland trek to the North
Pole was not accomplished until 1969, by
someone almost nobody ever heard of and
nobody really cared.

The Airplane Arrives
Things on the ground in the Arctic were
relatively quiet between 1910 and 1920.
Most expeditions in those years, concentrated on filling in the blanks in the map of
Arctic Canada to find a navigable northwest
passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific,

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

and there was not much point in visiting
the North Pole because at that time, it was
still believed that Peary had already been
there, and there was nothing new there to
be discovered. But by the 1920s, aviation
technology was literally taking off. Soon,
a new race was on to see who would be the
first to reach the pole by aircraft.

A Flight That Might Have Been
Since being the first to reach the South
Pole in 1911, Roald Amundsen had not been
idle. In 1914, he took flying lessons and
earned the first civilian flying license in
Norway, crashing only once in the process.
In 1917, he commissioned the building of
a ship, to be named the Maud in honor of
Norway's queen, intending to sail it via
Panama to Alaska with an aircraft aboard,
allowing the ship to be frozen into the
Arctic sea and drift north and east with the
ice as it moved with the currents, tides and
winds. When they had drifted closest to the
North Pole, he would fly the aircraft to the
pole, land there if possible and fly back to
the ship, thus becoming the first man to
reach the pole in this fashion. However, the
Great War intervened, making a crossing to
America in the new ship too risky, and the
Norwegian government could not spare one
of its few aircraft for the mission.
So in mid-summer 1918, the Maud, without an aircraft, sailed north from Oslo,
then east across the Arctic Ocean along
the north coast of Siberia. In the spring
of 1920, after being frozen in for two winters in ice that never moved, the Maud
sailed into Nome, Alaska, then south to
Seattle for repairs and refitting. Amundsen,
having already discovered a Northwest
Passage across northern Canada with his
Gjoa expedition in 1903-1906, had now
also traversed the Northeast Passage from
Europe to the Orient, making him the first
Jetrader - Spring 2014

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