The Aries

In their arctic flying suits, the British-Canadian crew of the converted Lancaster bomber looked like men from Mars. Every available inch of their 37-ton, four-engine plane, the Aries,* was filled with scientific equipment, much of it secret. When they left Whitehorse in the Yukon one day last week and landed 20 hours later at Shrewsbury, England, on the last lap of a two-week tour of Arctic exploration, they had accomplished more than many an explorer of a generation ago did in a lifetime. They had made three trips into the Arctic, found the present accurate location of the constantly shifting North Magnetic Pole.

The Aries left Iceland for her first flight on May 16. That afternoon she was over the geographical North Pole. After circling for an hour and a half, completing a trip around the world in 76 seconds by tightly banking around the Pole, the eleven-man crew dropped a beer bottle and a Union Jack.

The next flight was to the North Magnetic Pole, believed to be somewhere in the Boothia Peninsula of far northern Canada. They located it 200 to 300 miles north-northwest of where it is now shown on maps.

The full findings of the flight were not disclosed. The accurate pinpointing of the Magnetic Pole would aid navigation considerably over the top of the world.

* The first sign of the zodiac.

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