"All That Ice"

Pan American World Airways' Captain Charles Blair, on a busman's holiday one day last winter, streaked across the Atlantic at 450 m.p.h. in his own war-surplus FSI Mustang, and broke the nonstop New York-to-London record by an hour and seven minutes. Ever since, back on the job as boss pilot of a transatlantic Stratocruiser, he worked over plans for an interesting way to get his maroon Excaliber III back home.

Early one morning last week, 41-year-old Airman Blair jammed his 6 ft. 2 in. frame into the fighter's cockpit, gunned down the runway at Bardufoss, Norway, and headed north towards the Pole. Sealed off from tip to tip, his wings held 865 gallons of gas, enough for 5,000 miles. Soon the sea 22,000 feet below gave way to icy ridges and plateaus. A Norwegian Air Force Catalina flying boat patrolling near Spitzbergen gave him a radio call as he whisked past, reported back that Captain Blair was right on course. Hour after hour, the Mustang bored through the blue-grey sunlit haze over the icecap. Blair sat hunched behind his oxygen mask occasionally shooting the sun with a sextant.

Finally, faint radio signals from a radio range came in over his set. Blair homed in on them, crossed Alaska's northern coastline just one minute off his schedule. He refueled near Fairbanks, roared east at 25,000 feet across Canada, munching a roast beef sandwich between gulps of oxygen. Nine hours later, he set his Mustang down on the runway at New York's Idlewild airport. He was the first man ever to fly solo across the hazardous North Pole route in a single-engined plane.

Had there been any trouble crossing the Pole? "No," said Blair, a veteran of 23 years and 3,000,000 miles of flying. "It was a very easy flight. I got a nosebleed once and couldn't reach back for a handkerchief. The engine kept throwing oil on the canopy, so I couldn't see too well up ahead. The wings were leaking a little gas, and I didn't want to make any rough landings. But if anything had gone wrong, there was all that ice instead of water to set down on."

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