A Century Ago, an Explorer and His Pilot Claimed to Be the First People to Fly Over the North Pole. Here’s Why Experts Doubt That Achievement

While the success of Richard Byrd and Floyd Bennett’s polar flight has been disputed, the former went on to accomplish expeditions in Antarctica

Alice George | Museums Correspondent

May 8, 2026 3:05 p.m.

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On May 9, 1926, two naval aviators, explorer Richard Byrd and pilot Floyd Bennett, would claim to accomplish a new feat of flight. That day, the pair reported flying over the North Pole, which would have made them the first people ever to do so.

By the 1920s, achievements in flight were headline-grabbing events that illustrated the future importance of air travel.

“It wasn’t until the mid-1920s that airplanes became reliable enough and big enough that you felt comfortable to undertake some of these trips, be it flying across any of the oceans or to the North or South Pole,” says Bob van der Linden, a curator at the National Air and Space Museum. “It was a very exciting period, particularly because the airplane was a brand-new invention.”

Byrd and Bennett flew in a Fokker trimotor plane and took off from Spitsbergen, the largest island of Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, to reach the planet’s northernmost point. They were said to have completed the more than 1,500-mile roundtrip journey in about 15.5 hours. The duo noted that they circled the pole for 13 minutes before heading back to Spitsbergen.

When Byrd and Bennett returned to the United States, they were celebrated with a ticker-tape parade and Medals of Honor. But navigational experts expressed doubts about the possibility of completing the flight in just under 16 hours and the power of the plane, which reportedly had an engine leak.

Byrd turned his flight logs over to the National Geographic Society (a sponsor of the trip), which supported his claims of reaching the pole. However, when Ohio State University’s Byrd Polar Research Center revealed the contents of Byrd’s diary in May 1996, new questions arose. Some of his calculations seemed to contain errors. Furthermore, legible erasures suggested that they had turned back more than 100 miles short of the North Pole. As the New York Times reported: “After a meticulous examination of the diary’s contents, including some erasures at critical points, a specialist in navigation and science history has concluded that Lieutenant Commander (later Rear Admiral) Byrd almost certainly fell short of his polar destination and must have known at the time that he had not succeeded.”

In 2013, another Ohio State-led examination of Byrd’s notes found that he likely fell short of his goal.

Van der Linden is not sure that Byrd and Bennett made it, but he believes “it was a good-faith effort, and they thought they did it.” If Byrd and Bennett did not reach the pole, Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, Italian aviator Umberto Nobile, and American adventurer and financial backer Lincoln Ellsworth became the first to fly over the North Pole in a well-documented dirigible flight three days after Byrd’s attempt.

During this period of lauding airplane record-makers and uncovering the planet’s natural wonders, Byrd was an internationally known voyager. Born into a prominent Virginia family in 1888, he would graduate from the U.S. Naval Academy and later solicit contributions from wealthy sponsors, such as Edsel Ford and John D. Rockefeller, for his exploration of the Arctic and Antarctic regions.

Despite questions surrounding the North Pole flight, Byrd’s adventures contributed to the American imagination. In 1927, he flew the first trans-Atlantic airmail from New York to France. From the 1920s to the World War II-era, aviators aimed to figure out “how far, and how fast, how high you could go in an airplane,” says van der Linden. “It seemed like almost every day a new record was being set for going from Point A to Point B.”

Writer Marionne Cronin contextualized the era, noting that “U.S. aviation had a long association with public entertainment, and the emergence of barnstorming in the early 1920s and the appearance of early Hollywood films that used the airplane’s presence as a pretext for fantastic, death-defying stunts only reinforced this image.”

Byrd welcomed challenges, but he was not a daredevil, says van der Linden. While his work in the Arctic generated fanfare, he led numerous expeditions to Antarctica and helped increase scientific knowledge of the snow-covered continent. On his initial visit to Antarctica, he and three other men became the first to fly over the South Pole in November 1929. He received a Navy Cross in recognition of that achievement.

His most controversial activity during his studies of Antarctica occurred during his second expedition, when he spent several months alone in a small hut during the winter of 1934. Enduring temperatures far below freezing with only a radio link to his cohorts, his plan seemed unjustifiably dangerous to some of his colleagues. He became ill and suffered from carbon monoxide poisoning caused by his stove. Crew members driving tractors eventually picked up Byrd.

In Alone, Byrd’s account of his time in Antarctic solitude originally published in 1938, he wrote: “Out there on the South Polar barrier, in cold and darkness as complete as that of the Pleistocene, I should have time to catch up, to study and think and listen to the phonograph; and, for maybe seven months, remote from all but the simplest distractions, I should be able to live exactly as I chose, obedient to no necessities but those imposed by wind and night and cold, and to no man’s laws but my own. That was the way I saw it.”

He added, “perhaps, the desire was also in my mind to try a more rigorous existence than any I had known.”

Byrd went on to lead a 1946 Navy expedition to Antarctica called Operation Highjump, which involved thousands of personnel, and numerous aircraft and ships, to establish the Little America IV research base.

Bennett died of pneumonia in 1928 at age 37, and Byrd died of heart failure in 1957 at 68. Many observers believed that he never fully recovered from his illness during his months of isolation in 1934. While their North Pole claim became the subject of widespread debate, Byrd’s legacy would come to mean much more. “These were not self-indulgent PR things that a lot of people do today,” says van der Linden. “He wasn’t famous for being famous; he was famous for doing some serious work, and very courageous stuff—his flights in particular.”

Alice George | | Read More

Alice George, Ph.D. is an independent historian with a special interest in America during the 1960s. A veteran newspaper editor, she is recently the author of The Last American Hero: The Remarkable Life of John Glenn and has authored or co-authored seven other books, focusing on 20th-century American history or Philadelphia history.