Transport: 63 Hours 17 Minutes

When Russia established a base at the North Pole last month (TIME, May 31 & June 14), many were skeptical about the Soviet’s announced intention of inaugurating a Moscow-San Francisco airline. Last week skeptics were confounded when a Russian plane nonchalantly flew non-stop from Moscow to the U. S. via the North Pole.

The plane was a three-year-old ANT-25 (the initials for Designer A. N. Tupoleff) monoplane with one engine, 112 ft. wingspread. To fly it Dictator Stalin chose, not Sigismund Levanevsky as announced, but three other “Heroes of the Soviet Union”—Pilot Valeri Pavlovitch Chkaloff, 33, Co-Pilot Georgi Phillipovitch Baidukoff, 30, and Navigator Alexander Vassielievitch Beliakoff, 40. Last year this trio flew the same plane on a 5,858-mi. non-stop circuit of the Soviet Arctic. Because Levanevsky’s failure on a transpolar flight two years ago brought unfavorable publicity, this year’s venture was kept a dark secret long after the red and grey plane left Moscow. Then a Canadian radio station plucked the news from the ether that: “We are three hours from the Pole, flying nicely.”

Like a gnat buzzing over a man’s bald head, the ANT-25 droned along at a bare 100 m. p. h. with its 2,000-gal. load of gas, passed 20 mi. away from the North Pole base. When their radio cut out under polar magnetic influence, Navigator Beliakoff used the sun compass invented by Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd. It got so cold the drinking water froze, and the men would have too, but for their silk undergarments, leather breeches and turtlenecked sweaters. Only Baidukoff took a nap. Chkaloff stayed at the controls steadily, nursed his ship down over Prince Patrick Island to Ft. Simpson in far northern Canada, then veered to the Pacific Coast, headed down to the U. S.

Goal was San Francisco, but fog shut in, the flyers grew exhausted, and finally they turned back from Eugene, Ore., landed at Pearson Field, the Army’s air base at Vancouver, Wash. Bewhiskered, red-eyed and tottery, they stumbled from their plane, having covered about 5,288 miles in 63 hr., 17 min.—second longest flight in history* and one of the most important in charting an uncharted airway. The trio dragged themselves to the home of Brigadier General George C. Marshall, field commandant, drank his cognac, gobbled his breakfast, used his razor, then fell into his beds while the world applauded.

*Longest: the 5,657 miles from New York to Syria flown by Frenchmen Paul Codos & Maurice Rossi in 1933.