Jetrader - Spring 2014 - 32

In the autumn, a white knight appeared
in the person of Lincoln Ellsworth who
called on Amundsen unexpectedly in
October 1924. Ellsworth was a pilot and
an engineer who had led two small expeditions of his own in South America. He had
also applied to join Amundsen on the Maud
expedition but had been turned down. But
he was the son of a millionaire, so he could
help Amundsen put together the funds to
attempt a flight to the North Pole. The
two men formed a partnership to get the
Dornier-Wal plan back on track for 1925,
with Ellsworth's wealthy father reluctantly
putting up much of the money.

Amundsen's 1925 Attempt,
a Near Disaster
The new plan was to take two DornierWals, each with a crew of three, departing from Kings Bay, near Longyearbyen on
Spitsbergen, and fly directly north to the
pole. Despite promising Ellsworth's father
that they would then turn around and
return to Kings Bay, they in fact planned,
if all was well, to go onward the longer
distance to Alaska, hoping to find any new
land that existed between the North Pole
and Alaska. Had they found new land, this
discovery would be a greater prize than
simply revisiting the North Pole that all
still believed had already been reached by
Peary in 1909.
By May 1925, all was ready at Kings
Bay, which was still covered with a sheet

Amundsen's Dornier Wal flying boat, forced down on the ice about 150 miles from the North Pole in
1925. Given up as lost by the outside world, the men worked for a month with hand tools to create a
runway so they could fly back to Spitsbergen. (Photo from Preus Museum archive.)

of ice. Since the flying-boat aircraft could
glide across the ice with little friction, as
compared to taking off from water, they
would be able to take off with an extra
ton of fuel. The Dorniers were pushed out
onto the ice and away they went, heavily overloaded but nevertheless climbing.
After the two aircraft cruised together
uneventfully for about eight hours, one of
the engines on Amundsen's plane began to
sputter, so it was landed in a narrow channel of slushy water. Having no radios, the
crew on Ellsworth's plane didn't know what
happened. They set down in a lagoon not
far away that looked safer, but one engine
was damaged and the aircraft took on water
through a split seam in the hull and came
close to sinking. They were now only about
150 miles from the pole and 625 miles from

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Spitsbergen. There was virtually no hope
of a rescue.
From then on, the intrepid voyage of
discovery turned into a desperate fight for
survival. There was no way they could walk
all the way back home; their only hope was
to find a way to fly back. For the next few
weeks, they had to haul all available food
and fuel across pressure ridges and open
leads of water from Ellsworth's plane over
to where Amundsen's was, haul that plane
up out of the slushy water onto more solid
ice and also clear a runway from which to
take off-not an easy task with a couple of
wooden shovels, a hatchet and an ice axe.
Amundsen estimated they moved 500 tons
of ice and snow in 24 days, by which time
they had run out of food.
After waiting for decent weather, and
with Amundsen's plane stripped of everything possible to lighten it, all six men
climbed aboard and took off, barely clearing an icy ridge at the end of the runway,
and headed back to Spitsbergen. They
almost made it. With land in sight, their
aileron control system jammed, forcing
them to land on the water where they then
taxied to an icy beach. Before they figured
out where they were and how many days it
might take to make their way to civilization, they spotted a sail on the horizon,
piled back into the airplane, taxied as fast
as possible and eventually caught up with a
sealer's boat. Leaving the aircraft anchored
in a protected cove, they hitched a ride on
the boat back to Kings Bay where everyone there had believed they were dead.
The aircraft was soon repaired, retrieved
and flown to Oslo to a riotous celebration from enormous crowds relieved to see
Amundsen alive and well. Nevertheless,

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Jetrader - Spring 2014

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