Jetrader - Fall 2014 - 50

The Second Transpolar Flight
The second ANT-25 took off from Moscow
about a month later with a different crew.
The flight was nearly as perilous as the
first, but the aircraft eventually landed in
an open field in California's San Jacinto
Valley. More celebrations followed, including lunch in Hollywood with Shirley Temple
and a chartered flight to Washington to
meet with Roosevelt in the White House.
The Fédérat ion Aéronaut ique
Internationale (FAI) gave them credit for
a distance of 10,148.5 kilometers (about

6,306 miles), establishing a new world distance record by a margin of about 600 miles.
Skeptics suggested that the aircraft had
actually refueled at a Soviet fuel depot on
Franz Joseph Land, about 1,600 miles closer
to the North Pole than Moscow.

Was the ANT-25 Truly a
Russian Design?
Perhaps not. In 1931, the French company Dewoitine produced its Model 33 with
a V-12 Hispano-Suiza engine, equipped for a
three-man crew, and specially designed for

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50 The official publication of the International Society of Transport Aircraft Trading
3/24/14

685020_Aircraft.indd 1

Over the North Pole, by Georgi Baidukov
(the co-pilot on the first transpolar
flight), published in English by George
G. Harrap & Co, 1938.
The New York Times, Flight Magazine and
The Aeroplane magazine, various issues
in 1937.
Russia's Shortcut to Fame, A 50-Year Hoax
Exposed, by Robert J. Morrison, Morrison
& Family Publishing House, 1987.
long-distance flights. In July 1931, after
49 hours in the air while attempting to fly
nonstop from Paris to Tokyo, it suffered an
engine failure and crash-landed near Irkutsk,
in Siberia. A second Dewoitine 33 was built,
and it also went down on the way to Tokyo.
This one had a slightly different engine,
using a reduction gear for better propeller
efficiency. The Russians salvaged the two
aircraft but did not return them to France.
A few years later, Tupolev unveiled his
two ANT-25 transpolar, long-range aircraft
(allegedly an original Russian design)
equipped for a crew of three. Both had
"all-Russian" Mikulin M-34 V-12 engines,
but the second ANT-25's engine was an
M-34R model with a reduction gear for
better propeller efficiency. What a coincidence! Outside the USSR, the ANT-25s were
believed to be reconstructed Dewoitine 33s
with longer wings to give them greater
range performance.
Why would the Soviets use a six-year-old
French aircraft as the basis for the flights
in 1937? Rather than being as advanced
as the USSR wanted the world to believe,
their industries were terribly primitive.
After World War I, talented Russian aviation
engineers, including Sikorsky, Seversky,
Timoshenko and many others emigrated
to the West. The USSR was very slow in
recovering from this "brain drain," so foreign aircraft and parts were imported to
study and copy.
When American engineers examined the
ANT-25 that landed at Pearson Field, they
noted that the cockpit instruments looked
like Bendix units, and about half of the
parts on the supposedly Russian-designed
engines had actually been made in the
U.S. for Hispano-Suiza, the maker of the
engines on the Dewoitines. The U.S. kept
these revelations secret, perhaps believing it better to go along with the charade

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