At the North Pole last week it rained, and the three big Soviet planes beside the base camp sank slightly into the mushy surface of the ice floe. The fourth plane, which came down 40 miles away fortnight ago, waited till the weather lifted, then joined the main party, bringing to 35 the number of Russians encamped serenely at the top of the world to investigate scientific phenomena and build a base for a transarctic airline (TIME, May 31). Weather reports were reaching Moscow four times daily and at week's end hirsute Dr. Otto Tulyevitch Schmidt's staff had noted three facts of scientific interest: their radios worked most peculiarly, playing magnetic leapfrog over numerous electrical blind spots; the water was 2½ miles deep below them; their floe was drifting away from the Pole five miles each day, had already moved some 60 miles. Exciting event: someone spotted a guillemot, black-&-white seabird heretofore unknown so far north. Finally, with the base in perfect running order, the four planes took off together for the return to Rudolf Island 560 miles away. At the Pole for a year, they left four scientists and a dog. Since the gasoline supply was short, one of the planes sacrificed half its tankage for the others, came down halfway to wait until more fuel could be flown north. The rest reached Rudolf Island on schedule.
In Moscow, Dictator Joseph Stalin was pleased to designate Flyer Sigismund Levanevsky as the first man, when the time comes, to try the flight from Moscow to San Francisco via the North Pole base. Lithe, taciturn pilot Levanevsky is a boot-black's son who fought with the Red Guard in the War, first made news when he flew to the rescue of U. S. Flyer Jimmie Mattern in Siberia in 1933. Levanevsky later helped rescue the members of the wrecked Chelyuskin expedition. Two years ago he was forced back while attempting a non-stop flight from Moscow to San Francisco. Same year he and a companion flew in easy stages from San Francisco to Moscow via Bering Straits.
To the Air Ministers of Europe, the imminent likelihood of Soviet planes winging over the top of the world to the U. S. (TIME, May 31 et seq.), a development in air transport even more prodigious than Pan American's bridging of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans (TIME, Dec. 2, 1935), revives the old bugaboo of Red Wings over Europe.
Last September Louis Breguet, prominent French aircraft maker, returned from Moscow to announce: "With ten times as many workers as has France, the Soviet factories are producing 20 times as many airplanes, motors and accessories as in France. I should estimate that there are 200,000 men employed in the two laboratories, the five aero-motor factories and the four principal aircraft factories. . . . Annual production of fully equipped airplanes is of the order of 5,000. . . . The technique is not very modern but it is to the point. The works directors are engineers of incontestable merit."