AVIATION: North to Europe

From Los Angeles' International Airport one morning last week, a Scandinavian Airlines DC-6B roared up through the smog and headed north. Its destination: Copenhagen, via the Arctic. To trim roughly 650 miles off the regular California-Europe flight distance, the four-engine plane, with 13 crewmen and 22 passengers aboard, was going to fly where no commercial carrier had ever flown. That afternoon the plane stopped at Edmonton, Alta. After touching down early next morning at the big U.S. Air Force base at Thule, Greenland—a scant 900 miles from the North Pole—the plane was soon airborne again, driven toward Denmark by...