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FORT GEORGE G. MEADE, Md. (AFNS - 10/15/2012) -- The
morning after my talk with Gen. Curtis LeMay on Oct. 16,
1946, a 46th Reconnaissance Squadron F-13 with tail number
521848 made an extended long-range flight to the geographic
North Pole.
U.S. Air Force graphic by Sylvia Saab |
We had heard that Richard Byrd had flown
over the North Pole in 1926, so we assumed that this was the
second time in history that an American airplane was flying
over the pole. Our flight was not a mission with a specific
purpose, but one of pioneering for the purpose of
exploration and research. Dr. Paul A. Siple, military
geographer and scientific advisor to the Research and
Development Department of the Army General Staff, and Robert
N. Davis, operations analyst from Strategic Air Command,
accompanied me as special observers on the flight.
Capt. Lloyd G. Butler's crew had been selected for this
particular mission. As was routine with all missions of the
46th RS, all personnel on the crew were photographed prior
to flight and radio silence was observed immediately
following retraction of the landing gear. This flight was
particularly interesting for the crewmembers; not only
because it was the unit's first flight to the North Pole,
but also because our two visitors were considered to be
brilliant in their respective fields. Paul Siple sat in the
nose of the aircraft encircled by a panorama of Arctic
landscape, while Bob Davis monitored Lt. "Whit" Williams'
grid navigation procedures. I sat on my usual folding chair
over the nose wheel well, monitoring radio communications
and crew coordination.
As we flew over the Brooks
Range between Fairbanks, Alaska, and Point Barrow, we were
presented with an awesome view of unconquered wilderness.
The low October sun lent an amazing beauty to the
surroundings, with the knife-edged pastel purple shadows of
the mountains streaking across the soft blue landscape. I
mused that such beauty tranquilizes the spirit and brings
about a frame of mind that anticipates rather than fears
what lies ahead.
We were still aware of the danger,
however. While crossing the coast of the polar sea, we saw a
lagoon 12 miles southeast of the Inuit settlement of Barrow
where the humorist Will Rogers and his pilot, Wiley Post,
had met their fate a number of years earlier. I remember
that this point in the flight stirred our emotions and made
us wonder why that tragedy had to happen here, of all
places.
I again found that the leg over the polar ice
cap seemed to be a different experience on each flight,
offering scenery that was dramatically different from what a
pilot was used to seeing. If fear of the Arctic's immensity
wasn't one's predominant emotion, it was easy to become
mesmerized. Some days a crew was surrounded by various types
of clouds extending to the distant horizon, making them feel
as though they were on a stage encircled by scenery that was
constantly being changed in slow motion by invisible
stagehands. Then the floor of the "stage" would develop
fissures, and then cracks, which quickly grew until they
reached as far as the eye could see. It was as if a river
had cut through a stark, barren landscape. In a short
distance, this river (called a lead) narrowed and its sides
merged, creating walls of ice perhaps 50 feet wide and 30
feet high where the plates of ice crushed together. Where
the ice crushed downward, a large depression would be left,
which would fill with water.
After all our work on
earlier flights, I felt as if this particular flight went
very smoothly. The hours passed quickly for those not
observing the scenery. Williams was constantly working on
his grid navigation. Siple, too, was working with figures
and using his astrocompass. We were on the meridian to the
pole only a fraction of the time, but we were constantly
correcting to course. We had finally attained precision
navigation using the Grid System of Navigation. The course
corrections became much more rapid as we approached the
pole. I went back to the navigator's station to see how they
were doing.
Williams pulled on my sleeve to direct
my attention to the radarscope and announced, "We are over
the pole, now!" over the interphone as Lt. Dwayne Atwill
took our photograph at that precise moment. We flew a little
beyond the pole and the pilot banked around to the left
while Siple, Davis and I had a group picture taken with
Williams as we flew over the pole a second time. Then the
pilot banked right, and we saw beneath the plane a
depression where a lead had terminated exactly at the pole.
That was as close to a "visual confirmation" as we would
get.
It never crossed my mind that we might have made
history that day until sometime later when I viewed this
flight in perspective. This flight, perhaps more than any
other, proved the workability of the Grid System of
Navigation. It was only now that we could fly throughout the
Arctic and know where we were at all times. We could teach
these procedures to other SAC units, enabling the command to
no longer be limited to the mid-latitudes, but to become the
global deterrent force capable of keeping the peace
throughout the Cold War. The techniques we refined were also
applied to the development of "black boxes" by
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, which would enable
world aviation to routinely fly the transpolar routes. We
didn't know it at the time, but we made the whole world
navigable.
We couldn't have made this flight with any
precision at all without using the Grid System of
Navigation, which made all our efforts in the Arctic and
beyond possible. It was the very preciseness of this system
that made it possible to know we were over the pole when we
were. We were the first flight in history to do that.
Previous polar flights navigated with the less accurate
Bumstead Compass or sextants alone and did not benefit from
a form of navigation as accurate as the Grid System of
Navigation. This flight was eventually recognized in a 1992
television program about America's greatest achievements as
one of the ten greatest accomplishments of the United States
within the last 50 years.
The accomplishment of
developing the Grid System of Navigation also prompted Gen.
Carl Spaatz, the first Air Force chief of staff, to state
that the 46th Reconnaissance Squadron was "one of the great
units of aviation history, and I rate their work as the
greatest single air achievement since the war." Spaatz
nominated me as the Air Force's candidate for the Collier
Trophy for the greatest contribution to aviation during
1947.
It is now also a matter of record that Ken
Jezek, former director of the Byrd Polar Research Center,
has acknowledged the fact that due to the "navigational
uncertainty of the early ages," referring to Byrd's flight,
this 46th RS flight, with the precision of the Grid System
of Navigation and results verifiable by radar photography,
unavailable on earlier attempts, "would have been the first
with the technical and aircraft capability to really know
they made it."
By USAF Retired Col. Maynard E. White
Air Force News Service
Copyright 2012
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