POLAR FLIGHT

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XIX, Issue 305, 11 December 1929, Page 5

POLAR FLIGHT

FASCINATING PICTURES MAGNIFICENT MOUNTAIN SCENERY. GREAT PEAKS CLOAKED WITH SNOW. (By Russell Owen, copyright, 1028, by the “New York Times” Company and the "S» Louis Post Dispatch." All rights for publication reserved throughout the world. Wireless to the "New York Times.”] (Received If. 9.45 a.m.) Bay of Whales, Dec. 9. The pictures of the polar flight are fascinating They depict • •light thiouga me mountains, up the deep gorge of the glacier where the walls at times seen only a few feet away from the 'plane and show the rising surface of the Barrier coming closer and closer, which necessitated throwing overboard food co lighten the plane, and then tho final jump over which the plane staggered to the long slope of the plateau. The scenery is magnificent, great peaks rising above the 'plane cloaked with snow except where the black, precipitous sides are too steep to hold it. Rivers of ice pour down between them. The jumbled mass of mountain is as impressive as any in the world, rising along the edge of the interior plateau as the ’plane went southward from them. At the point where the 'plane entered the plateau photographs were taken at intervals, so that they overlapped. They show mountains stretched to the east and gradually curving north until the ’plane reached the interior of the polar plateau, when even the mightiest of them disappeared below the horizon and there was only the limitless plain beneath, without landmarks or guides except the sun and magnetic compass.

DIFFICULTY OF FLIGHT. “Nothing could so well make clear the difficulty of this flight as these photographs. The whole trip to the Pole can be brought home to anyone when these strips are combined with the ones from Little America to the mountains taken on the base-laying flight. There is such astounding mountain scenery that everyone has been poring over them with exclamations of delight. “These mountains are particularly interesting because they are separated from any known land heretofore placed on the charts. “Byrd, on his eastern flight, flew north and east and south of the Alexandra mountains, which run in a different direction from that shown on the charts. There is considerable difference between the eastern and the new mountains, at least 50 miles and probably more.”