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Published in The Seattle Times online on June 11, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on June 14, 2026
Seattle celebrated dirigible’s first flight over North Pole in 1926
By Clay Eals
The ice-laden North Pole bespeaks mystery. How much more unfathomable must it have seemed a century ago, when no human eye had seen it from above?
While ground explorers reportedly reached the pole in 1909, a collective desire to see it from the air intensified in the Roaring Twenties, when hazardous, barrier-breaking aviation captured imaginations and created instant heroes. Examples included the first flight to circle the world, a five-month group effort based in Seattle in 1924, and Charles Lindbergh’s famous solo journey across the Atlantic in 1927.
In-between, on May 12, 1926, came an aerial accomplishment celebrated here but little known today — the first undisputed human flight over the North Pole. Notably, the vehicle was not a conventional airplane but instead a dirigible, a form of passenger and military air transit much more common and familiar at the time than now.
In 71 hours, the hydrogen-filled Norge airship and its 16-man crew crossed the pole while traveling 3,400 miles.
The expedition began from the high-Arctic Norwegian island of Spitsbergen and ended with the dirigible’s deflation at the town of Teller, Alaska, then a U.S. territory.
The principals represented a trio of countries:
- Norwegian Capt. Roald Amundsen (1872-1928), flight organizer renowned for having led the first ground trek to the South Pole in 1911. The dirigible’s name saluted his homeland.
- U.S.-based Lincoln Ellsworth (1880-1951), a wealthy explorer and engineer who financed the flight.
- Italian Col. Umberto Nobile (1885-1978), a prominent aviator and the airship’s commander and designer. The Norge’s construction was backed by his country’s notorious dictator Benito Mussolini.
The only joint public appearance of the three in the United States post-flight came weeks later in Seattle. On June 27, 1926, traveling aboard the steamer Victoria and escorted in Elliott Bay by yachts and military planes, they arrived at then-Pier 2, site of today’s state ferry terminal.
Mayor Bertha Landes and 5,000 others welcomed the three, who paraded to the Olympic Hotel. They spoke the next day at a Seattle Chamber of Commerce banquet broadcast live on KFOA radio. The mustachioed Amundsen, widely viewed as the flight’s spokesman, told the crowd of 700 that the crew’s lighter-than-air odyssey had legitimized future cross-polar commercial aviation.
Other polar journeys followed, producing success and tragedy, including, ironically, given their intermittent friction, Amundsen’s death two years later in an airplane search for Nobile, who was on a second Arctic expedition when his dirigible, the Italia, crashed.
Still, the Norge’s 1926 extraordinary achievement endured. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer called it “one of the world’s greatest adventures.”
At the Seattle banquet, Amundsen seemed to sense its finality. “I’ve fulfilled my every ambition,” he said. “My work is ended. What more could I ask?”
WEB EXTRAS
Big thanks to Knute Berger, Bob Mayer, Bob Carney, the Museum of Flight‘s Peder Nelson and Cody Othoudt and especially Dan Kerlee for their invaluable help with this installment!
To see Clay Eals‘ 360-degree video of the “Now” prospect and compare it with the “Then” photos while hearing this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.
Below, you will find 3 additional internet links, 2 additional videos, 2 additional photos, 1 additional essay and 38 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com, Washington Digital Newspapers and other sources that were helpful in the preparation of this column.
The news clips include a reflective 13-part series under the joint byline of Amundsen and Ellsworth, written for the New York Times and exclusively published locally in the Seattle Times.
Internet links:
- HistoryLink essay by Robert Mayer: “Roald Amundsen and crew of the airship Norge visit Seattle after their historic North Pole flight on June 27, 1926″
- Facebook group: “Zeppelin & Airship Collectors: Stamps, Mail & Ephemera”
- Book: “Umberto Nobile and the Arctic Search for the Airship Italia”
