Recalling South Pole Trek, 75 Years Later

Dec. 5, 2004 — -- On a clear November afternoon 75 years ago, Navy Rear Adm. Richard Byrd and three companions climbed into their Ford Tri-Motor plane and flew south.

They were literally trying to reach the end of the Earth. At the South Pole, the sun does not rise for six months at a time. The average temperature is 60 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.

By 1929, only two teams of men had attempted the feat, and one had died on the way back. But Byrd was a master planner, determined to do better. He had previously flown over the North Pole; there was only one left to conquer.

"He was a man who was driven to explore, driven to do things, driven to do deeds," said historian Lisle Rose.

Rose says Byrd, who died in 1957, was something that has mostly disappeared today: a professional hero, an entrepreneur-explorer who goes where nobody has been before, and captures the national imagination.

"He was a man of a different time," Rose said. "He was a man of a time when the world was a lot bigger, transportation was a lot slower, and there were still these enormous gaps in our understanding of the world."

The trip from Byrd's base on the Antarctic coast was 800 miles each way, over some of the most rugged mountains on earth.

There were no reliable maps and no weather satellites at the time -- even a compass was useless that far south. His team navigated instead by the sun.

Upon reaching the pole, they dropped a flag out the window and turned north. The entire trip took 19 frozen hours.

"He had done it," said Rose of Byrd's achievement. "He was the first person to fly over both poles, and nobody else could ever do that again. Nobody else could be the first to do both."

Byrd went for the glory of being first, but also, he said, for the science. He pushed the technology of the airplane -- more than that other aviation hero, Charles Lindbergh.

Today, there is a research station at the South Pole, partially made possible by Richard Byrd's efforts.

"Byrd should be looked at as the pivotal figure in moving exploration from the heroic age to the mechanical age," said Raimund Goerler, archivist of Byrd's papers at Ohio State University.

A few weeks ago, to mark the anniversary, airmen of the New York Air National Guard's 109th Airlift Wing decided to retrace Byrd's route.

There was no fanfare when they reached the pole; they were the fourth supply flight of the day.