North Pole Flights
In August 1935, Levanevsky completed his first North Pole flight, a journey from Moscow to San Francisco. A contemporary of Charles Lindbergh, Levanevsky was celebrated as a hero of the new age of aviation. In early 1936 he flew back from Los Angeles, USA to Moscow, USSR covering 19,000 kilometers (over 11,800 miles) on his way.
On August 12, 1937 a type Bolkhovitinov DB-A (no. N-209, a Dalniy Bombardirovshik-Academy, i.e. Long-range Bomber) aircraft with 6-men crew under captaincy of Levanevsky started its long distance flight from Moscow to the USA via the North Pole. The radiocommunications with the crew broke off the next day, on the 13th of August, at 17:58 Moscow time when the aircraft encountered adverse weather conditions. Jimmie Mattern flew a Lockheed 12, "The Texan" from California to assist in the search for his former rescuer.After the unsuccessful search attempts all the members of the crew were presumed dead.
In March 1999, Dennis Thurston of the Minerals Management Service in Anchorage located what appeared to be wreckage in the shallows of Camden Bay, between Prudhoe Bay and Kaktovik. There was conjecture in the media that it was Levanevsky's aircraft, but a subsequent attempt to locate the object again proved unsuccessful.
Read more about this topic: Sigizmund Levanevsky
Famous quotes containing the words north, pole and/or flights:
“The North is full of tangled things and texts and aching eyes
And dead is all the innocence of anger and surprise,
And Christian killeth Christian in a narrow dusty room,
And Christian dreadeth Christ that hath a newer face of doom,
And Christian hateth Mary that God kissed in Galilee,”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“O, withered is the garland of the war,
The soldier’s pole is fallen!”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Old man, it’s four flights up and for what?
Your room is hardly any bigger than your bed.
Puffing as you climb, you are a brown woodcut
stooped over the thin rail and the wornout tread.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)