ARCTIC FLYING EXPERIENCES BY AIRPLANE 

 AND AIRSHIP* 



Lincoln Ellsworth 



The Airplane Flight of 1925 



The story of our flight from Spitsbergen in 1925 with two air- 

 planes out over the Arctic Sea to within 136 miles of the north pole 

 has already been told.^ After a flight of eight hours, the time es- 

 timated to bring us to the pole, we came down into the first open lead 



Fig. I — The airplane N-24 after having landed on the pack ice of the Arctic Sea in 87° 44' N. and 

 about 10° 20' W. on the flight of May, 1925. (Figs. 1-4 photographs from the author.) 



big enough for our planes to land in to take an observation as to our 

 exact whereabouts, for we had been heavily drifted to the westward 

 by a strong northeast wind, and our fuel was half consumed. We 

 found ourselves to be in latitude 87° 44' N. and longitude 10° 20' W. 

 Thus, while we had flown 600 miles — the exact location of the pole 

 from Spitsbergen — our drift of 50 miles off our course was responsible 

 for our loss in latitude and the fuel necessary to carry us to the pole. 

 Before we could get out, the lead closed up, and it required twenty- 

 five days at hard labor to free our imprisoned planes. This, in short, 

 is the history of the flight itself. The scientific results, from an expe- 

 dition that cost $150,000, consisted in viewing 120,000 square miles 

 of hitherto unknown territory and the taking of two soundings with 

 a Behm echo sounding machine which showed the depth of the polar 



* The manuscript of which this article is a part was kindly made available by Mr. Ellsworth for 

 publication in the present volume. It has since been published in full under the title of "At the North 

 Pole" in the Yale Review for July, 1927 (Vol. 16, pp. 739-749)- 



1 Roald Amundsen and Lincoln Ellsworth: Our Polar Flight, New York, 1925. 



411 



