From Pole to Pole: Roald Amundsen's Journey in Flight

by Garth James Cameron

Overview

Roald Amundsen was the most successful polar explorer of his era using sledges, dogs, skis, and ships. He is mainly remembered for being the first man to reach the South Pole on December 14, 1911. What is less often remembered is that he was also the first man to reach the North Pole on May 12, 1926 as the leader of the Amundsen-Ellsworth-Nobile expedition in the airship Norge. His involvement in aviation from his experiments with man-lifting kites in 1909 to his death in 1928 while flying from Norway to Spitsbergen has not been the subject of a detailed study until now.

From Pole to Pole explores Amundsen’s enthusiasm for flight from the moment he read about Bleriot’s flight across the English Channel in an airplane. In June 1928 Amundsen and five companions took off in a search and rescue flight for the missing airship Italia and were never seen again. The only traces of the men and their aircraft were a tip float and an empty fuel tank which washed up on the coast of Northern Norway several months later. Searches of the seabed near Bear Island for the remains of the Latham 47 flying boat he was flying in took place in 2004 and 2009 and interest in the mystery of his disappearance remains high.

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Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781473834477
Publisher:	Pen & Sword Books Limited
Publication date:	01/31/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	194
Sales rank:	934,228
File size:	19 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Garth James Cameron is an attorney specializing in aviation law and living in New Zealand. He has been flying since he soloed when he was sixteen years old. He has held a commercial pilot’s license since 1975 and has logged more than three thousand hours as pilot-in-command of a wide variety of airplanes. He is also a qualified glider pilot and has tried parachuting, ballooning, and paragliding. He has owned the largest aviation history library in private hands in New Zealand.

Table of Contents

Introduction vi

Chapter 1 The Past is a Foreign Country 1

Chapter 2 Before Amundsen (Part One): Salomon August Andrée 7

Chapter 3 Before Amundsen (Part Two): Walter Wellman 14

Chapter 4 A Sailor Struck by Lightning 21

Chapter 5 A Flight to the North Pole? 39

Chapter 6 Toward the North Pole 53

Chapter 7 A Merciful Deliverance from the Ice 70

Chapter 8 Svalbard 79

Chapter 9 Oslo-Rome 85

Chapter 10 Learning to Fly: Ciampino 104

Chapter 11 Positioning Flight 112

Chapter 12 Hour of Gold 129

Chapter 13 Enough Credit for Everyone 142

Chapter 14 Our Names Would be Linked One More Time 152

Chapter 15 Gardens of Stone and an AUV 173

Epilogue 178

A Note on Sources 182

Annotated Bibliography 184

Appendix 1 Glossary of 1920s Aviation Terms 190

Appendix 2 Dornier Wal (Whale) Flying Boat 196

Appendix 3 Airship Norge 198