Vince,

You are correct that Byrd exhibited a great deal of courage, with some
frequency. He jumped into the water and rescued a crewman during an
unloading accident in the Antarctic. However, he seemed to go weird
when it came to his flights. The books by Balchen and others outline
the frustration they had with his refusal to do any actual navigating
on their flights. I have a great deal of admiration for Byrd, but in
reading the historical record, can't figure out why he would behave as
he did during his expeditions.

As to the North Pole flight, the pilot, Floyd Bennett admitted on his
death bed that they had simply flown out of sight of Spitsbergen and
made circles for 15 hours because of an oil leak on one engine.
Byrd's navigational markings on his charts were made on the steamship
on the voyage home. They did not match the weather data that was
available for the flight (winds), and would have required a very
strong tailwind on both legs of the flight to and from the North Pole.

The History Channel program implied strongly that Byrd was the pilot
on his flights. He never was. He never did any flying on his
expeditions. It also implied that he was flying when the Fokker
Trimotor he purchased for the Atlantic flight crashed. He was not, it
was not his fault at all. Tony Fokker had designed the airplane badly
nose heavy. Bennett, Byrd and Fokker all jammed into the cockpit
(there was no way to get from the cockpit into the cabin...odd design,
but that was Fokker's decision and common at the time in his
airplanes). Once in the air they determined that the c.g. was way too
far forward and that they were going to be in trouble on landing. As
the History Channel showed, the airplane flipped on landing. Bennett
was seriously injured and never really recovered (Byrd wanted him to
be the pilot on the Atlantic flight but he was still recovering and
died prior to the South Pole flight - Byrd named the Ford used for the
South Pole flight the Floyd Bennett, as a memorial to Bennett, the
airplane is in The Henry Ford Museum now). The Fokker was rapidly
rebuilt and was ready to go before Lindbergh even got to Long Island.
For reasons no one knows, Byrd refused to take off. His continual
delays angered Fokker so much that he withdrew from the project and
nearly took his airplane with him. In fact, Byrd had scheduled a
"christening" party for May 21 for the Fokker, after it had been on
the departure airport for nearly two weeks. Lindbergh launched on the
20th and Byrd's "christening" party turned into a celebration for
Lindbergh as word of his success arrived in the middle of the
"christening". Byrd delayed nearly two more weeks before he finally
allowed the crew to fuel the airplane and take off. Balchen and
Acosta both wrote that Byrod provided no navigational assistance to
them during the flight across the Atlantic. They reached the French
coast and Balchen figured out where they were because he had learned
to fly in Norway and had flown in France some years earlier. He set
course directly for Paris as the radio receiver they carried gave them
a forecast that Paris was going to close down in fog. Byrd overruled
Balchen at that point and demanded that they fly north along the coast
until reaching the Seine and then follow it to Paris. That delayed
them more than two hours, in which time the weather in Paris went down
the tubes. They scud ran down the Seine until near Paris when the fog
got too bad, so they climbed up and flew west to the coast. Balchen
and Acosta talked Byrd into letting them dead reckon back to Paris,
which they did. They got to the area and circled, getting told by
radio that they were overhead and that the field was fogged in.
Balchen, Acosta and Byrd decided that descending was too dangerous
with the Effiel (sp?) Tower in the vicintiy and dead reckoned back to
the coast where, nearly out of gas, Balchen successfully ditched the
airplane just off the beach where the D-Day attack would occur in
1944.

For the South Pole trip there were four airplanes and four pilots
taken to Little America. Because Balchen had the most cold weather
experience (he was from Norway, had flown with Roald Amundsen on two
of his expeditions and then was chief test pilot for Fokker and had
used Universals and Super Universals to help a Canadian airline set up
an operation in the Hudson's Bay area) he was selected to fly the Ford
4AT on the South Pole trip. (The communication on that airplane, as
with the tranAtlantic Fokker, between Byrd in the cabin and the pilots
was via notes clipped to a clothesline and reeled back and forth.)
There are films of Byrd using a sextant on the South Pole flight, but
he gave no positions to the pilots on the flight. They dead reckoned
their way south, initially following red flags set out by the dog sled
crews that carried fuel to the cache at the base of a glacier that
marked the mountain range that required a climb to the polar plateau.
That climb was remarked upon by the History Channel and is still
considered one of the greatest feat of airmanship ever, as Balchen
used ridge soaring techniques to get the Ford, with its light wing
loading, to climb high enough to clear the pass onto the polar
plateau. (The crew had dumped several hundred pounds of food carried
for survival in case they went down along with any "nonessential
equipment" to lighten the airplane during that climb.) According to
the books written by the occupants of the airplane, Balchen sent a
note back saying that his dead reckoning showed they'd be in the area
of the South Pole in five minutes. Byrd then sent a note forward that
said his navigation agreed with that. They circled the Pole and
dropped a flag that was tied to a stone from Floyd Bennett's grave (in
Canada, where he'd died of pneumonia when he'd left the hospital to go
on the flight to rescue the German fliers in the Bremmen that had
landed in eastern Canada).

On the trip north, Byrd pulled out brandy he'd not tossed out with the
food and, according to the crew members, got drunk and was unable to
help with the refueling in sub-zero temperatures.

In looking at the record, Bryd deserves tremendous credit for
organizing and planning his expeditions as well as selecting the most
talented men for each job. He had the best mechanics, the best dog
handlers, etc. When things actually happened, he would behave
strangely and he rarely gave credit to the men who actually did the
work or the flying. He did know how to play the publicity machine.
Even today, after nearly 80 years, we know of Byrd's "flights" but who
knows who actually did the flying? Without going and looking it up, I
can't recall the name of the fourth crew member on the Atlantic flight
nor of the second pilot or of the radio operator/photographer on the
South Pole flight.

All the best,
Rick

vincent p. norris wrote in message . ..
Interesting thing about Byrd's "flights": although he was trained as
a naval aviator, he never did any of the flying on any of his
expeditionary flights, choosing to "navigate". Unfortunately, he
never did any of that either, leaving finding the destination to the
pilot.

Rick, I think you've gone overboard there. Byrd obviously navigated
pretty damn well for about 16 hours, IIRC, in a most difficult part of
the globe where a magnetic compass is almost worthless. If he had
not, he would never have got the airplane close enough to Spitzbergen
for the pilot to be able to see the airport, even in CAVU conditions.

I, too, was trained as a Naval Aviator, and when I went back to
college, the University of Illinois decided I had "earned" 30
college-level credits in celestial navigation. That's a normal
full-year's worth of credits--the equivalent of a "major." But I
could not possibly navigate an airplane for 16 hours in the polar
regions and find my destination airport.

Byrd had invented a new kind of compass, a "Sun Compass," to make the
navigation possible.

It's pretty well accepted that he faked his North Pole flight...

He didn't fake "the flight"; he and Floyd Bennett flew for about 16
hours. It does seem clear, now, that he didn't reach the pole;
whether he "faked" that part, or simply screwed up, I don't think
either you or I can know for certain.

On his flight over the Atlantic, he screwed around so long in
preparation that Lindbergh beat him.

His airplane nosed over on landing, on a test flight, damaging the a/c
(and seriously injuring Floyd Bennett), which delayed his flight.

Byrd got hammered on brandy he'd snuck aboard, and passed out.
He revived by the time they got back to Little America. He provided no navigational
assistance to the crew on the flight. The books by Balchen and others
on the crew are fascinating.

I haven't read those books, but I've read others that were very
critical of Byrd; however, I don't recall any of them mentioning his
getting "hammered." I'm sure you know that not everything we read is
true. He certainly was a prickly character, probably a "spoiled rich
brat," and perhaps a grand-stander, but he demonstrated his personal
courage on several occasions.

vince norris