Jetrader - Summer 2014 - 50

Once they reached the North Pole, Byrd asked
Bennett to make a wide circle so that even if
his navigation was off by a few miles the pole
would have to be somewhere inside the circle.
down the sides of the hull, some falling
into the engines or propellers and then
flung against the ship's fragile covering.
Whenever the sun came out, it heated
up the hydrogen gas which expanded
and some gas had to be vented to avoid
bursting the lifting cells, and when the
fog reappeared the ship would get heavy
again and ballast had to be dropped to
keep them airborne. After three days aloft
they had no more ballast to drop, so the
Norge was wrecked when they were forced
to make a more or less controlled landing,
coming down near the village of Teller,
Alaska, about 100  miles short of their
destination, Nome.
Despite the success in reaching the pole
and being the first flight from Spitsbergen
to Alaska, it was a anticlimactic ending.
Nome had been promised the airship would
land there. A triumphal arch had been set
up on the main street, 100 men had been
assembled to handle the landing ropes,
and the city was all decked out with a gala
reception planned for the arrival of the
Norge, but it never arrived. Besides, Byrd
had supposedly beaten them to the pole,
so what was there to celebrate?

Back in Kings Bay, the Byrd party was
packing up to leave. Floyd Bennett, Byrd's
pilot, had taken a liking to fellow pilot
Balchen (who, along with two others had
been left behind to save weight on the
Norge) and invited him aboard the Josephine
Ford for two short flights before it was
loaded onto the ship. Byrd approached
Balchen, saying he had more plans for
Arctic flying and needed someone with
cold-weather flying experience. Would
Balchen be interested? He accepted and
received another year's leave of absence
from the Norwegian military, and boarded
the ship to New York.

The Byrd Flight Aftermath
The authenticity of Byrd's claim to have
reached the North Pole in the Josephine
Ford has never been fully settled. His
navigation records have been researched
in excruciating detail, with some people
concluding that the records were falsified
and that the flight didn't go much farther
than over the horizon from Spitsbergen,
where it then flew back and forth for about
15 hours and then came back to Kings Bay.
Others believe the records prove that the

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flight enjoyed favorable winds (in both
directions) and truly made the distance
to the pole and back exactly as planned.
As Balchen's wife, Bess, narrates in her
book, Poles Apart, Bernt explained to her
that the math was simple. The distance
from Spitsbergen to the North Pole and
back was about 1,550 miles; the flight
lasted 15 and a half hours, so it must have
averaged 100 mph. But when Balchen and
Bennett took that same airplane on tour in
the U.S. (with wheels, not drag-inducing
skis, and not overloaded with fuel and survival equipment) his logbook shows they
averaged only 79 mph.
Today, in Wikipedia, the entry for
Floyd Bennett begins unequivocally:
"Floyd Bennett ... was an American aviator who piloted Richard E. Byrd on his
failed attempt to reach the North Pole in
1926." On the other hand, the extensively
researched 2008 biography of Byrd by Lisle
Rose (see "To Dig Deeper" below) attempts
to debunk the scoffers with several pages
of astronomical calculations and aircraft
performance data that purportedly prove
the pole was reached.

The Rest of the Story:
As Fateful as the Story
After Byrd's flight to the North Pole, the
Fokker Trimotor Josephine Ford was displayed
for a time in the Wanamaker's department
store in New York (Mr. Wanamaker being a
major financial supporter of the expedition). Then the Guggenheim Foundation
agreed to finance a tour of the Josephine
Ford around the United States, going west
across the northern states to Los Angeles,
then back via Texas and the southern
states, making about 50 publicity stops
along the way. Floyd Bennett would be
the pilot, and Bernt Balchen the co-pilot.
It a dream job and the two became fast
friends on the tour. The Josephine Ford is
now on display at the Henry Ford Museum
in Dearborn, Mich.
Balchen, having assisted Byrd for the
flight to the North Pole, was the co-pilot of
Byrd's 1927 flight from New York to France,
about a month after Lindbergh's solo transAtlantic flight. He then returned to his job
as an engineer and test pilot for Tony Fokker
in New Jersey. One of his fondly remembered tasks there was to modify a Lockheed
Vega aircraft with long-range fuel tanks
for Amelia Earhart. He and Earhart then

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