Transport: No Bearings

When Russia first told an incredulous world of its plan to establish a transpolar airline to the U. S., it announced that its No. 1 flyer, Sigismund Levanevsky, would make the first trip (TIME, June 14 et seq.). Instead, this bootblack’s son who is often called “the Soviet Lindbergh” was left behind at the last minute and Valeri Chkalov took his place. When the second successful junket was made month later by three other Soviet airmen, Flyer Levanevsky began to be mentioned in dispatches as in jail and scheduled for execution in one of J. Stalin’s current purges. Last week, however, when the third flight was launched, it appeared that the great Levanevsky was not in the Soviet doghouse at all but had merely been kept under cover for the most ambitious transpolar hop of the summer. He promptly proceeded to bungle it.

The first two flights had been made in slow, single-motored jobs. Purpose this time was to demonstrate the route’s commercial importance and Levanevsky was given a huge, new, four-motored monoplane with crew of five and cargo of caviar, furs and mail. Having greater speed but less range than the single-motored pioneers of the route, this red and blue giant was scheduled to stop for fuel at Fairbanks, Alaska. By week’s end it had not reached this far-northern outpost. Approaching the Pole in sub-zero temperature, it had battled tremendous winds and ice. One motor had failed. Then the radio went silent and it eventually became apparent that the ship was down somewhere between the Pole and Alaska. Since six weeks’ rations were aboard and there is plenty of room to land on the ice, Russian airmen refused to be worried, set out to search from Russia and from Fairbanks. Into the air too leaped Joe Crosson and several others of the eager band of Alaskan flyers whose rescue work in the past has brought them world-wide renown. From Los Angeles, Flyer James Mattern, who contemplates a transpolar flight to Moscow and who was once rescued in Siberia by Flyer Levanevsky, dashed non-stop to Fairbanks to return the favor in his new Lockheed Electra. Spurring the search, the Army Signal Corps station in Anchorage announced the receipt of a weak radio message from the grounded plane: “No bearings . . . having trouble with . . . wave band.”