“But his mind was soaring across the ocean. As early as 1917 Byrd wanted to fly the Atlantic. But there was always something that interfered. After the war, he petitioned the Navy again about a cross-Atlantic voyage, and was given permission to go over to England and sail the ZR-2 back to America. How tragically this may have ended for Byrd you can see. The ZR-2, on a trial flight suddenly burst into flames and crashed into the Humber river. Forty-four of the passengers were killed, among them friends of Byrd. It was Richard Byrd’s task to investigate the wreck that might very easily have claimed him for one of its victims. “In 1924 his hopes seemed about to be realized at last. He was assigned to the dirigible Shenandoah, and was to fly it across Alaska and the North Pole. But the Shenandoah, too, met with disaster, and Byrd’s hopes were again dashed. The Navy rejected his petition to go with Amundsen on the trip that he planned over the Pole, and all hope seemed gone. In fact, as a final blow, Byrd was retired from the aviation service altogether. “But he was as undaunted by this setback as he had been by his retirement from the Navy. He set about immediately to organize his own Polar expedition, which was to be climaxed by his flight over the Pole in 1926. “Floyd Bennett, whom Byrd often said was the best man in the world to fly with, helped him plan his expedition which was to be the realization of all his boyhood dreams and visions. It wasn’t easy to plan, and the foresighted planning, they knew, would mean the success or failure of their project. “They chose a three-motored Fokker monoplane, with 200 horsepower Wright air-cooled motors. It was 42 feet 9 inches long, with a wing spread of over 63 feet. It was capable of a high speed of 120 miles an hour. “That was the plane, the Josephine Ford. Their ship was the Chantier, given him by the Shipping Board. The crew was made up of picked men, and Byrd knows how to pick them. Not one of them failed to live up to his expectations on that trip. “On April 5, 1926, all of the plans being completed, and the last supplies of food to last fifty men for six months being stowed away, the Chantier sailed from New York for King’s Bay, Spitzbergen. They got there on April 29th, after an uneventful trip, and anchored in the Bay. But the problem of getting the plane to shore arose. They solved it by building a huge raft, loading the heavy ship onto it, and towing it to shore through the choppy, ice-blocked water. “When they got the plane onto the shore, the wheels sank into the snow, and they had to replace them with skis, which seemed ample to sustain the weight of even that great craft. How frail they really were was to be proved later.