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Frigid Test. For 6,000 miles, 20 Army planes of the 1st Pursuit Group at Selfridge Field, Mich., will wing a bleak way to Seattle and back again, this week and next, to test the winter endurance of personnel, of new high-powered planes. The planes use skis instead of wheels on landing gear.
Stumped. In heavy snowfall, darkling skies an airplane groped around for Stout Field, Indianapolis, last week. The pilot misjudged the size of the field and overshot it. A snowcovered stump at the end tore away the left wheel and part of the fuselage. Transcontinental Air Transport had to mark up one dead, two injured.
*Comparable to him in Arctic experience and flying skill, but not in navigation, are Bernt Balchen, Commander Byrd's chief pilot in Antarctica and Hjalmar Riiser-Larsen, both Norwegians. Last week Riiser-Larsen flew from the whaling ship Norvegia in Antarctic waters and took possession of newly discovered land for Norway across the polar continent from Byrd's quarters.
†Later the Army world flyers flew along southern Alaska and the Aleutian Islands (westward, 1924), the Russian disguised bomber Land of the Soviets along the same route (eastward, 1929), Parker Dresser Cramer from New York to Nome (1929), Ross G. Hoyt from New York to Nome to British Columbia where he crashed.
*In 1928 Eielson and Wilkins made their astounding air way across the Arctic from Point Barrow eastward to Spitsbergen, across converging lines of longitude, through shifting fields of terrestrial magnetism—at 135 m.p.h. The late Roald Amundsen, with Lincoln Ellsworth and Umberto Nobile, beat them to the first Arctic air crossing by sailing the semirigid dirigible Norge from Spitsbergen westward across the North Pole to Nome, Alaska. Amundsen was killed two years ago trying to find hapless Umberto Nobile who had been wrecked with his Pole visiting semirigid Italia. Wilkins is now at Antarctica making occasional exploratory flights from Deception Island. Eielson was with him there last year, would have returned except that he had "to make some money." He said: "This exploring life is fascinating. But you can't live on glory when you get old." Managing Alaskan Airways was the opportunity he took.