National Affairs: Four Men in a Fog

“We are going to land,” scribbled Commander Richard Evelyn Byrd on a slip of paper. He crawled back through the fuselage of the giant Fokker monoplane, America, handed the paper to Lieut. George 0. Noville who was lying on the floor, exhausted, temporarily deafened by the roar of the motors. “It was just as if he were handing me an invitation to tea,” said Lieutenant Noville. The paper was shown to Lieut. Bert Balchen who was piloting the plane, and to Bert Acosta who was so deaf and so miserable that he did not seem to care what happened.

For five hours, they had been flying over France, lost in a fog that obscured land and the tips of the America’s wings. Once, for a moment, they thought they saw rows of squat bath houses on a beach. Again, there seemed to appear a faint haze of light—perhaps it was Paris or the beacons at Le Bourget airport. Then the fog swallowed all. “When we got above the clouds,” Commander Byrd later told the New York Times, “there were at times some terrible views. We would look hundreds of feet into fog valleys—dark ominous depths. At times the cloud peaks on the horizon looked exactly like a land of mountains. At other times they took on the appearance of a beautiful lake or river. . . .”

Their earth inductor compass had fits of running wild, their radio had become disabled, they were fast running out of gasoline—when suddenly at 3 a. m. they saw the sea-coast and the flicker of a lighthouse beacon beneath them. That was the moment when Commander Byrd scribbled: “We are going to land.” It was safer to drop into the sea than to crash into unyielding, un known, fog-blanketed land, he decided.

So Lieutenant Balchen piloted the America into the waves, as gently as possible. The impact hurled Commander Byrd, watching at his cabin window, into the sea. He saw Lieutenant Noville climbing out of another window, dazed and unable to hear his shouts. He swam to the cockpit, helped Lieutenant Balchen extricate himself from the wreckage. Everyone yelled for Bert Acosta—he was not in the cabin—but soon he appeared out of the dark waves. Two days later, a Paris surgeon discovered that Mr. Acosta had a fractured collarbone, the only serious injury of the crash.

The four men in a fog inflated their pneumatic tub, paddled 200 yards to the shore of the little fishing village of Ver-sur-Mer, where in 1588 one of the prides of the Spanish Armada had been shattered on the rocks. Lieutenant Noville twice returned to the America’s wreck to save the first transatlantic air mail, a tiny Betsy Ross flag for President Gaston Doumergue of France, some of Commander Byrd’s scientific data.

Aroused from sleep, the villagers of Ver-sur-Mer aided in dragging the America into shallow water, bringing ashore the three Wright Whirlwind engines which had not once whimpered during the flight. Although the distance between Roosevelt Field, L. I., and Ver-sur-Mer on the coast of Normandy is 3,477 miles, yet Commander Byrd estimated that the America flew some 4,200 miles during its 42 hours’ journey.

Commander Byrd. Virginia has been proud of its Byrds ever since William Byrd fought Indians in 1683. Today there are three famed Byrd brothers—”Tom, Dick and Harry.” Harry F. Byrd is Governor of Virginia. Capt. Thomas D. Byrd, U. S. Army retired, served with distinction in the World War, now manages a vast apple farm in Maryland. Commander Richard Evelyn Byrd is the outstanding scientist-aviator in the U. S.

He was born in Winchester, Va., 37 years ago. Adventurous at 12, he took a trip around the world, during which he was forced to eat carrots and monkeys while quarantined in the Philippines. He entered the Navy via Annapolis. His services to aviation include the invention of the bubble sextant (giving flyers an artificial horizon), the perfection of the sun compass and the drift indicator. He was flight leader of the MacMillan expedition to Greenland in 1923. Everyone knows the story of his flawless flight from King’s Bay, Spitzbergen, to the North Pole and back in 16 hours on May 9, 1926. Last week he hinted that his next exploit would be a trip to the South Pole.

Lieutenant Noville, flight engineer of the America, left Cleveland at 16 to join the Navy and sail around the world. Bluejackets remember that it was not long before he became a mighty oarsman, football player, broad-jumping champion of the Navy. After helping to occupy Vera Cruz in 1912, he learned to fly, was assigned to the spectacular Esquadrille Candinana on the Italian front during the World War. He has long been a friend of Commander Byrd, who put him in charge of the Spitzbergen base during the North Pole flight.

Lieut. Balchen, 28, the youngest member of the America’s crew, was born in Tviet Hopedale, Norway, received his flying training at the Norwegian Naval Academy. It was he who suggested to Commander Byrd that he use skis instead of wheels on his polar plane. Lieut. Balchen came to the U. S. in 1926 to serve as test pilot and engineer in Anthony Fokker’s company.

Bert Acosta, who piloted the America, until the coast of France was reached, has Spanish blood in his veins, is more of a daredevil and less of a technician than the other members of the crew. He has driven racing automobiles as well as the winning airplane in the 1921 Pulitzer Cup. He taught Canadians to fly before the U. S. entered the War. He served in both the U. S. Army and Navy.

Associated Press. After a celebration, people dislike to be told that they were celebrating an error. Newspapers that use the Associated Press service were temporarily jubilant last week because they published the following “scoop”: “Paris, July 1.—(By A.P.)—Commander Richard Byrd’s transatlantic monoplane America landed at Issy Les Moulineaux, near Paris, early this morning.”

Inspired, many a rewrite-man manufactured intimate details of the landing of the intrepid flyers, the hearty welcome by the crowds. Many a headline screamed: BYRD IN PARIS.

As a matter of fact, Commander Byrd and his crew were at that time lost in the fog and did not alight on the sea near Ver-sur-Mer until two hours later. In a tardy checking of the false report, an A. P. correspondent found a lone watchman at Issy Les Moulineaux, who had neither seen nor heard an airplane.