Air routes, currently operating and potential, are shown here in red, regular shipping routes in white. Projection is a polar projection instead of the usual Mercator projection.
North Pole was discovered by Robert E. Peary on April 6, 1909, after 25 years of Arctic exploration. On it he placed a battered American flag. Near it, someday, planes on worldwide routes will fly.***
AZIMUTHAL MAP SHOWS
POSSIBLE AIR ROUTES
In fighting a war, transportation is never measured purely by the cost of moving a cargo. Instead it is measured by the time of moving a cargo. One obvious way to minimize the time expended is by using planes instead of ships. Another is to use the shortest routes. On this azimuthal map, LIFE presents its own projection of some possible polar air routes from the U.S. to Moscow, London, Chungking, Tokyo, Berlin and other fighting fronts.
The map is based on one obvious fact which people are likely to forget—that the world is round. Therefore, the shortest routes are not straight lines drawn on a flat map. They are great-circle courses, and because the world’s most important nations lie in the Northern Hemisphere, they either cross the North Pole or come close to it. The shortest way to Chungking is over Alaska. The shortest way to Moscow is through northern Greenland.
To use northern routes such as these, either now or in the future, requires flying through Arctic temperatures and over Arctic terrain. This is not as difficult as popularly supposed. In fact, the colder the weather, the safer the flying. When the snow is dry enough, it dusts off a plane’s wing and leaves even less weight on the plane than does a tropical rain. Near the Pole this condition prevails. Farther away from the Pole, in the sub-arctic zones, ice on the wings is more common. There the rain or wet snow freezes as the plane gains altitude. There also is likely to be considerable fog and misty, cloudy snow—both flying hazards.
Arctic flying, of course, is nothing new. Since 1925 polar exploration has been carried on largely by air. Wilkins, Byrd, Riiser-Larsen, Mawson, Ellsworth, Soviet Russian Explorers Golovin and Schmidt all used planes. In addition, planes are used continuously as ice patrols over shipping routes, as transportation to and from meteorological stations, as supply carriers for mineral prospectors in the Canadian Arctic. But what is new is the carrying of huge cargoes by air from one of the world’s great nations, through the Arctic, to another great nation. Such a concept, whether in war or peace, once it is materialized and executed, may change the course of world civilization.
Life February 15, 1943
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