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Bernt Balchen

"We saw the great polar plateau through the clouds. It was a critical moment. Bernt yelled in my ear above the roar of the engines: 'We must drop 200 pounds immediately or go back.' A few hundred feet now might make the different between success or dismal failure. Suddenly the wheel turned loose in Bernt's hands. 'Quick, dump more,' he shouted. Food went through the trapdoor. We seemed to shoot up. Bernt gave a shout of joy. The Pole."

That is how Richard Evelyn Byrd recalled the electric moment of November 29, 1929, when the Ford Tri-Motor crossed a dot in the wasteland of Antarctica. Balchen was pilot, and Byrd's joy was two-fold. The handsome Norwegian had helped save both their lives two years earlier when Byrd's [[italics]] America [[/italics]] crashed in the sea near Ver-Sur-Mer, France, negotiating an Atlantic crossing from Roosevelt Field, L.I. The skill of Balchen is legion both as a pioneer in navigation, and as a man of audacious courage.

In 1928 he piloted a relief expedition to Greenly Island, Labrador, with the kind of humanitarian zest he had shown as pilot of the Amundsen-Ellsworth Relief Expedition to Spitzbergen in 1925. From 1933 through 1935, Balchen was chief pilot for the Ellsworth Antarctic expeditions.

A founder of Scandinavian Airlines System and one of its former presidents, he is very probably the world's foremost polar aviator.

[[image - small drawing of a propeller]]

Bernt Balchen: born Tveit, Topdal, Norway, October 23, 1899

22 [[image - black and white photo of Bernt Balchen, head shot wearing pilot's helmet]]

[[caption]] Balchen, in a romantic portrait style popular with the aviation fraternity in the late 1920s. This photograph was taken prior to his 1929 Antarctic expedition with Byrd (22). Amid the Tri-color of France, and Old Glory, America awaits takeoff at Mineola, Long Island. Rodman Wanamaker, mercantile pioneer, helped finance the New York - Paris expedition (23). [[/caption]]

23 [[image - black and white photo of the America plane before takeoff, overview shot showing crowd]]

"AMERICA" 1927
CREW: Commander RICHARD F. BYRD, Commander; Capt. BERTRAM ACOSTA, First Pilot;
Lieut. GEORGE O. NOVILLE, Radio Operator and Flight Engineer;
Lieut. BERNT BALCHEN, Second Pilot.
Left Roosevelt Field L. I. - June 30, 1927, at 5:24 A. M., Eastern Standard Time.
Arrived Ver-Sur-Mer, France - July 2, 1927, at 2:32 A.M. Paris Time. Flying Time, 40 hrs., 8 min.