History Channel Show reminder

You are correct that Byrd exhibited a great deal of courage, with some
frequency. ...... 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.

Thanks for taking the time to write a lengthy response, Rick. I
haven't read Balchen's book. I guess I should. I did read two books
quite critical of Byrd, Richard Montague's _Oceans, Poles, and
Airmen_; and Dean Smith's _By the Seat of my Pants_, ten or more years
ago. I don't recall anything about his "going weird," though, or
refusing to navigate.

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.

Perhaps you should entertain the hypothesis that he did NOT behave
that way; that the charges were fictitious, motivated by jealousy,
personal dislike, or some such reason. As you mentioned, he wasn't
generous about sharing the credit for his achievements. There was
also a lot of resentment, in Europe, that Byrd had beaten the Airship
Norge, a European venture, to the Pole.

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.

I find that extremely hard to believe, Rick. It contradicts
everything else we (or I) know about Byrd. I do recall that Bennett
crawled out of the cabin in mid-flight to deal with that oil leak,
but I never heard of that death-bed confession.

I have no trouble believing Byrd didn't reach the pole. His Sun
Compass was excellent at providing directional information, but it
provided no ground-speed info at all.

As you mentioned, Bennett died of pneumonia in Jeffrey Hale Hospital
in Quebec, Canada, the result of attempting, although he was already
ill, a flight to rescue the crew of the Bremen, who had made a forced
landing on Greenly Island in the Gulf of st. Lawrence. Given the
circumstances of his death, and his heroic reputation, he was no doubt
being hovered over by a staff of doctors and nurses, trying to keep
him alive. Did they report such a confession at that time?

Byrd's navigational markings on his charts were made on the steamship
on the voyage home.

How can we be certain of that?

They did not match the weather data that was available for the flight (winds),....

I would imagine any data available for such a desolate, uninhabited
part of the globe, in those days, was hardly reliable. I'm sure you
know that even today, forecast winds are usually the most undependable
part of any weather briefing.

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.

Except for doing the flying while Bennett was out there dealing with
the oil leak, that is probably true. But I don't think that is a
criticism. Navigating that flight was a far greater challenge than
Bennett's stick-and-rudder chores, although I'm not slighting what it
takes to do them for 16 hours.

As I recall, in aviations early days, it was customary for the
"captain" of an airplane not to do the flying, just as the captain of
a naval vessel does not hold the wheel. (I don't think the Commander
of NASA's space shots is the pilot, either.)

It also implied that he was flying when the Fokker
Trimotor he purchased for the Atlantic flight crashed.

I didn't get that impression. IIRC, Anthony Fokker was flying it,
wasn't he? (In any case, programs on the History Channel are loaded
with mistakes, so such an error wouldn't be unusual. In fact, an
error-free program would be much more unusual.

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.

I don't know, either, but I do seem to recall that Lindbergh had to
wait around for the wx to improve. "Refusing to take off" is one of
the smartest things a pilot can do. As you agreed, earlier, we can
hardly attribute his delay to cowardice.

Balchen and Acosta both wrote that Byrd provided no navigational assistance to
them during the flight across the Atlantic.

Is that in Balchen's _Come North With Me_? I see we have that here in
the Penn State library. I can find nothing in the catalog by Acosta,
though.

For the South Pole trip there were four airplanes and four pilots
taken to Little America....

When I was in the Marines, I had the pleasure of knowing two
extraordinary men who had been selected to go to the South Pole with
Byrd on Operation High Jump in 1946. One was M.Sgt. Mincey, a radio
oerator in VMR 252; and another M.Sgt whose name escapes me in my
senility; he was a navigator in VMR-153; both squadrons were in MAG
21, as was I. (In the Marines, at least in those days, navigators
were enlisted men.) Regrettably, I have lost track of both in the
ensuing half-century; I suspect both are dead by now. Both were older
than I and would be pushing 90 by now.

As I recall the navigator had developed some kind of grid-system for
navigating in the polar regions, and was seriously injured in a crash.
A mountain in Antarctica was named for him. Did you encounter
anything about either of those men in any of your reading about Byrd?

vince norris