Balchen - Postwar Activities

Postwar Activities

From November 1948 to January 1951, Balchen commanded the 10th Rescue Squadron of the U.S. Air Force, which was located in southern Alaska but which operated across all of Alaska and northern Canada rescuing crashed airmen. Balchen led this squadron in the development of the techniques that became widely used in cold weather search and rescues. He was also directly responsible for persuading the U.S. Air Force to purchase the de Havilland Canada DHC-2 Beaver bush aircraft, one that became an important search and rescue aircraft for the Arctic. In May 1949, while commanding the 10th Rescue Squadron, Balchen flew a Douglas C-54 Skymaster from Fairbanks, Alaska, via the North Pole to Thule Air Base, Greenland, and hence he became the first man to pilot an aircraft over both geographic poles of the Earth.

Balchen was primarily responsible for the pioneering and development of the strategic air base at Thule, Greenland, built secretly on his recommendation, in 1951 under severe weather conditions which, by extending the range of the Strategic Air Command, increased the capabilities that made the SAC a significant deterrent to Soviet aggression during the Cold War.

After retiring from the U.S. Air Force in 1956, Col. Balchen continued to serve the Air Force on special assignments and aviation and energy industries as a consultant. He joined General Precision Laboratories as a consultant in 1959, as well as working with a host of other companies including Hughes Aircraft, General Dynamics, Canadair and the Electric Boat Company. Working for Canadair in 1966, then the parent company, General Dynamics, from 1966–1971, Balchen had authority over projects as diverse as ice-breakers, tankers, new epoxy materials for submarine construction, seagoing electronic weather systems and over-snow vehicles. In 1962, he also worked with the USAF presenting a proposal on the Apogee Intercept Defense System (AIDS) in 1962 and later, was the leading advocate for "Project Iceman", a proposed system of intermediate range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) stationed in Greenland.

As one of the world's foremost Arctic experts, Balchen was sought out by numerous companies and government agencies including Canada and Norway. Balchen was hired as a consultant by Hercules Oil, then Phillips Petroleum and Moran Towing on plans to extract oil from Alaska using pipelines. According to a 1972 article in the Christian Science Monitor, Belchen asserted that "a general warming trend over the North Pole is melting the polar ice cap and may produce an ice-free Arctic Ocean by the year 2000."

In his native Norway, Balchen was a driving force in the establishment of Det Norske Luftfartselskap (D.N.L.) ("The Norwegian Airline Company"), with which he pioneered commercial Europe↔US airline flights across the North Pole. D.N.L. later merged with Danish and Swedish airlines into the major carrier Scandinavian Airlines.

Balchen continued to work in consultancy until his death, although in his final year, he was diagnosed with bone cancer, dying in 1973 at Mount Kisco, New York.