Flights & Flyers

Goliaths. Giant planes of U. S. manufacture have met with bad luck. Fire almost destroyed Keystone's 18-passenger Patrician. Rebuilt, it toured the country, then at Boston this summer it broke itself in a ditch. (It has again been rebuilt.) The Burnelli Skyliner for Paul Wadsworth Chapman (owner of the Leviathan) was washed out landing in a high wind. Anthony Hermann Gerard Fokker, designer extraordinary, was greeted with commiseration when he stepped off the Homeric, back from Europe, last week. His F-32, seating 32 persons, largest U. S. land plane, had just crashed a row of buildings near Roosevelt Field, L. I., shortly after taking off with fouled and overheated motors. The ship burned itself and two houses. Vexed, Designer Fokker declared that pilot's fallibility rather than faulty design was the cause. The pilot was Marshall Sutherland Boggs, temporary Fokker test flyer, on leave of absence from the Department of Commerce.

"Lone Wolf of Alaska." After arousing German enthusiasm by being the first outsider to pilot Claude Dornier's 12-motored flying boat, the DO-X (TIME, Nov. 25), George King, "lone wolf of Alaska," tuned the enthusiasm to higher pitch last week by proposing a flight, in a Junkers plane similar to the Atlantic flying Bremen (TIME, April 23, 1928), from Dessau, Germany, across Siberia, Alaska, Canada, to New York.

Eielson Lost? Carl Ben Eielson, most experienced of all Arctic flyers, was probably groping over the ice packs off Cape North, Siberia, last week. Flyer Eielson knows the Arctic as well as the palms of his slim, steady hands, off one of which (the left) the Arctic cold bit a finger one day when his plane was forced down. For several years he piloted Capt. Sir George Hubert Wilkins, explorer, over icy wildernesses. Their greatest exploit, as great a piece of avigation as ever was done, was flying from Point Barrow, Alaska, over converging meridians of longitude and across shifting uncharted lines of magnetic force, to Spitsbergen (TIME, April 30, 1928). Last year Eielson flew Sir Hubert from Deception Island over a section of Antarctica (TIME, Dec. 31). This winter he was to fly over the South Pole, but preferred to organize Alaska Airways Corp. for The Aviation Corp.* Last month Eielson flew to the rescue of two icebound fur ships. One trip was made successfully (TIME, Nov. 25). On the next trip he disappeared. Friends did not despair. They recalled Eielson's forced landing in 1927 when he and Sir Hubert were a fortnight walking in over the pack ice east of Point Barrow.

Last week a native dog teamster reported that he had seen a thin column of smoke near where Pilot Eielson might have been forced down.

Metropolitan Hysteria. A low-flying plane crashed on a building in crowded Manhattan last fortnight. The police, somewhat hysterical, threatened to require flyers to keep at least 7,000 ft. above the ground. Department of Commerce regulations stipulate 1,000 ft. as minimum over congested areas. To quiet metropolitan hysteria two planes of the Gates Flying Service last week cut off their motors at 3,000 ft. over the centre of the island and glided, with moderate wind to help them, to safe, dead stick landings at New York's outskirts. An ordinary commercial plane has an average gliding ratio of 8 to 1. From a half mile height it can glide four miles in still air.

Statistic

Nearly 9,000 passengers have been flying in the U. S. in various sorts of aircraft each day so far this year. By the end of the year they will have flown about 100.000,000 mi. One of them, on that total, would have traveled to the sun--Assistant Secretary of Commerce Clarence Marshall Young.

Polar Byrd

A cold green horizon cheered the Byrd Antarctic Expedition Thanksgiving Day. It meant clear flying weather toward the South Pole. Into their grey Ford transport climbed Commander Richard Evelyn Byrd, Pilot Bernt Balchen, Radioman Harold June, Photographer Ashley McKinley. The fuselage door slammed shut . . . hand salutes . . . smooth take-off with the three Wright motors howling. Commander Byrd's mind "shot back to an exactly similar scene in the Arctic spring, May 9, 1926, when Floyd Bennett and I arose from the snow at Spitzbergen and headed North-Pole-ward. . . . Wrapped in a U. S. flag which the explorer planned to drop over the South Pole was a stone from Floyd Bennett's grave. The plane was named Floyd Bennett.

For 450 miles they flew due south uneventfully, over the great ice plain called Ross Shelf. The diffuse sunlight cast no shadow of their speeding ship to ripple over the sastrugi (hardened waves of windblown snow) below. Then they were at the Queen Maud Range.

Whoever has seen the sheer eastern face of the Rocky Mountains and can imagine them bleached white, can visualize the perpendicularities before these flyers. For three steep miles the Antarctic wall rises, like the side of a giant ice-cream freezer. The loaded plane could not mount so high. . . .

Commander Byrd, navigating, sought a nick in the icy wall, of which the late lost Roald Amundsen had written. It appeared, filled by a cascaded glacier whose lip was more than two miles above sea level. The plane climbed, air gusts heaved it, eddies filluped it, it slowly lost speed. Balchen at the controls yelled to Byrd standing behind him that he could not get over the rim with his load. Byrd dumped three month's supply of food, which skittered down the glacier. The plane hitched itself upward--and over.

Hours later a radiogram left the plane: "We have reached the vicinity of the South Pole. . . . We can see an almost limitless polar plateau."--Byrd.

For a few minutes they romped around the polar point, then scurried--for gasoline was getting low--300 miles by Byrd's brilliantly precise navigating* to the plateau's rim, down a second billowing glacial gorge. A landing at the cliff foot for fuel stored days before ... a scoot for Little America . . . rest . . . exuberant radio reports to the New York Times and the world.

Chief potential results for science: evidence, from photography, as to whether or not Antarctica is one or two continents, as to whether or not its mountains are extensions of the Andes.

Chief fame for Byrd: it made him the first man in history to fly over both poles.

* Parker Dresser Cramer, who twice vainly tried to fly from Illinois over Canada, Greenland and Iceland to Europe (TIME, July 15) was with Explorer Wilkins and Flyer S. Alward Cheesman on Deception Island last week, preparing to attempt a South Pole flight. *Rendered possible by 80 pages of intricate computations and figures of George Washington Littlehales, 69, government hydrographic engineer, comfortably located in Washington. The Littlehales tables are to the avigator what Bowditch's tables are to the navigator. They aided Commander Byrd's North Polar flight.

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