One Summer: America, 1927

fly most of the way without demanding any of the credit or glory.
    The fourth member of the crew was the most anonymous. George Noville, the radio operator, was retiring, bespectacled, and all but invisible to history. He was the son of a wealthy hat manufacturer from Cleveland (who was important enough to merit an obituary in the New York Times , something his son never got). If Noville made any impression on his fellow flyers, none bothered to record it. He barely appears in Byrd’s and Balchen’s autobiographies, is entirely missing from all others and left no account of his own.
    As for Byrd himself, he was a remarkable human being, but not at all an easy one to figure. A born adventurer, he made his first trip around the world at the age of just twelve after persuading his parents – who were evidently seriously indulgent – to let him travel alone to the Philippines to visit a family friend and then to continue home the long way round. He was nearly fourteen by the time he completed his circumnavigation.
    Byrd was smart, handsome, reasonably brave and unquestionably generous, but he was also almost pathologically vain, pompous and self-serving. Every word he ever wrote about himself made him seem valorous, calm and wise. He was also, and above all, very possibly a great liar.
    On 9 May 1926 – almost exactly one year before Nungesser and Coli disappeared – Byrd and Floyd Bennett made a celebrated flight from Spitsbergen, in the Arctic Ocean, to the North Pole and back in 15½ hours, just beating a rival flight in an airship by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen (and piloted by Umberto Nobile, another Italian fascist airman). Byrd’s polar flight was considered a feat for the ages. Byrd was promoted to commander and lavishly treated to parades and medals upon his return home. People named children after him. Streets were named after him. One overexcited admirer penned a biography of his dog Igloo.
    From the outset, however, doubts were privately voiced aboutByrd’s achievement. Knowledgeable observers couldn’t see how Byrd and Bennett could have made the round trip in 15½ hours. Balchen had flown the same plane extensively and had never got the cruising speed above 65 knots (74.8 mph). Byrd’s flight to the Pole required a cruising speed nearly a third faster. Moreover, for the polar flight Byrd’s plane had been fitted with enormous skis for snow landings, which added substantial drag to the craft and knocked perhaps five miles an hour off its speed. When Balchen mentioned to Bennett that he couldn’t understand how they had made it to the North Pole and back in such a short time, Bennett replied, ‘We didn’t.’ He confided to Balchen that the plane had developed an oil leak soon after taking off, and that they had flown back and forth for fourteen hours without ever losing sight of Spitsbergen.
    Rumours that Byrd had at the very least exaggerated his achievement persisted for years, and suspicions were darkened by his family’s long refusal to let scholars examine his papers. It wasn’t until 1996, after Byrd’s archive was purchased by Ohio State University for its new Byrd Polar Research Center, that his log of the flight became available for examination. The log showed heavy erasures where Byrd had done his calculations of distance travelled, suggesting to many that he had falsified the data. A more generous interpretation would be that he had made a mistake in his first calculation and started over. No one can absolutely say, but according to Alex Spencer of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, it is now generally believed among experts that Byrd and Bennett never reached the Pole.
    What is certain is that when Balchen’s autobiography was published in 1959, two years after Byrd’s death, it aired some of the doubts about Byrd’s claims. Byrd’s family volubly protested. Under pressure, Balchen’s publishers agreed to cut several passages and to withdraw from sale the first four thousand copies of the book. The Byrd family wasn’t fully placated, however. Balchen by this time was an American citizen and a respected member of the United StatesAir Force, but Senator Harry Byrd, the explorer’s brother, reportedly blocked Balchen’s promotion to brigadier general and had him quietly relieved of duties. Balchen passed the rest of his career sitting in the Pentagon library reading.
     
    Just as people were wondering if Byrd would ever take off for Europe, he decided