American naval officer Richard Byrd and pilot Floyd Bennett took off from Spitsbergen in a Fokker trimotor named the Josephine Ford and reported reaching the North Pole roughly fifteen hours later, before returning safely. The flight electrified the public and won Byrd the Medal of Honor, though later analysis of his navigational records has cast doubt on whether the plane actually reached the pole. It nonetheless marked a landmark moment in the era of heroic polar exploration by air.
The race to conquer the North Pole by air pitted Byrd against the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, who was preparing his own attempt using the airship Norge. Byrd, a well-connected naval officer with backing from wealthy patrons including Edsel Ford and John D. Rockefeller Jr. (the plane was named for Ford's daughter), assembled a small team at Spitsbergen, Norway's Arctic outpost, and pushed to beat Amundsen into the record books.
On May 9, 1926, Byrd and pilot Floyd Bennett lifted the three-engine Fokker off the ice and flew north over a forbidding white expanse of pack ice and open leads, navigating with sun compasses and dead reckoning since magnetic compasses were useless so close to the pole. They returned claiming a round trip of about fifteen hours and forty minutes, and announced they had circled the pole itself.
Byrd became an instant American hero, awarded the Medal of Honor and a ticker-tape parade. Decades later, historians examining his original diary found erased sextant readings suggesting the flight may have turned back short of the pole, an embarrassing asterisk on an otherwise storied career that included Antarctic expeditions in the years that followed. Amundsen's airship crossed the pole just three days later, unambiguously.