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Aviation History
1952
1952 - 2216.PDF
184 OVER THE TOP Another Project for a Polar Airline Route LAST week we published an article on the possibilities of flying scheduled services between America and Scandinavia via the Arctic, and referring to the S.A.S. project. Now comes a report of a similar plan submitted for the necessary C.A.B. ap proval by an old-established air-transport operator in Alaska. ONE of the most go-ahead among the aviation com panies operating in Alaska, Wien Alaska Airlines, of Fairbanks, is reported to be preparing to organize a 6,000-mile scheduled North America-to-Scandinavia ser vice across the polar regions. Its managing director, Mr. Sig Wien, has for many years supported the idea of scheduled services between Alaska and Northern Scandinavia via the Polar Basin (that is, the ice- jammed waters contained by the arctic coastline of North America, Greenland, Siberia and Arctic European Russia) and today the company's plans for such a service are sufficiently advanced to have been laid before the Civil Aeronautics Board. Wien Alaska approached Scandinavian Airlines last year with a view to reciprocation in the use of airfield facilities in Alaska and Scandinavia. The Scandinavians have rejected this proposal, no doubt on the grounds that they would prefer a completely free hand in the operation of a polar schedule. During a recent visit to Alaska, however, a special correspondent was told that Wiens are going ahead with their preparations to operate such a service. Subject to C.A.B. approval of the plans (writes this corres pondent) it will operate out of Fairbanks with DC-4S bearing the slogan Arctic Route on their noses; they will fly south of the 3,375-mile polar route blazed by Capt. Charles Blair in Excalibur HI, (a rebuilt 1943 F-51C Mustang with a Packard- built Rolls-Royce Merlin engine and 865-gallon fuel tanks) in May 1951. The company certainly has very considerable experience in arctic aviation. It was founded by Noel Wien in 1925 with a single Fokker F.III. The first pilot to fly to Point Barrow (then an Eskimo settlement on Alaska's arctic coast line and now a main U.S.A.F. and naval arctic research base), he founded a bush-pilot service second to none in Alaska or Arctic Canada. In 1938 Noel Wien sold out; relinquishing his chairmanship in favour of his brother Sig, he returned to bush flying, in which he is still engaged. Today Wien Alaska Airlines operate a summer schedule of 16 nights per week between Fairbanks and Anchorage to Nome, carrying mail (for which they receive subsidy), passengers and freight. Loading a W.A.A. Cessna 170 bushplane on the sea-ice off Kotzebue. Among the airstrip spectators watching a Wien Alaska Airlines DC-3 loading—an Eskimo woman with a child in her fur hood. Air freight and mail are much the same thing in Alaska. The Eskimo half-breed manager of the airstrip at Kotzebue (the Eskimo settlement just north of the Bering Straits and opposite the Siberian coast) told the writer : "You're liable to have even washing machines air-mailed to you in this country." The company has not forsaken true bush-flying business. In the past the bush pilot was invariably self-employed, an individualist who became a bush pilot because he wanted to fly where he wanted to and when he wanted to. His employ ment by an airline is a new development in bush flying. Wien's have four pilots operating out of Eskimo Kotzebue, flying Norsemen, Cansps, Cessnas, Beavers, Stinsons and Bellancas, wearing skis or wheels in winter and floats or wheels in summer, and operating either from the sea directly in front of the settlement or from a gravel airstrip some two miles behind the long row of huts that is Kotzebue. Four or five aircraft were in operation when the writer was there; he saw one of them, flown by a half-Eskimo pilot, put out of commission by a rough landing, and seven were frozen-in or drifted-over around the airfield. The company's small aircraft serve as a link between Kotzebue and remote trapping settlements along the coast, and between Kotzebue and Nome when the weather at Nome Pilot and Eskimo "loader" of a Norseman operating from Kotzebue.
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