Byrd Claims the First Flight Over the North Pole
On this day · 9 May 1926
In 1926 a young naval officer said he had conquered the top of the world by air, a claim that still divides historians.
On May 9, 1926, US Navy commander Richard E. Byrd and pilot Floyd Bennett announced that they had become the first people to fly over the North Pole. Their aircraft was a three-engined Fokker monoplane named the Josephine Ford, which lifted off from Spitsbergen, an Arctic island in Norway, before turning toward the geographic pole.
The round trip covered roughly 1,500 miles and lasted about 15.5 hours. Byrd handed his navigation logs to the National Geographic Society, a backer of the expedition, and was celebrated with a Medal of Honor.
Whether the pair truly reached 90 degrees north remains one of aviation’s great unsolved questions.
Doubts surfaced for decades, and in 1996 scholars at Ohio State’s Byrd center examined his diary, finding erased figures suggesting he may have turned back short of the pole. If so, the dirigible flight of Amundsen, Nobile, and Ellsworth days later holds the honor instead.
Sources & references
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