Carl Ben Eielson, the Hamilton Metalplane, and the Search in the Siberian Ice That Cost Alaska Aviation Its Father

Carl Ben Eielson established Alaska’s first airmail service, flew the first aerial crossing of the Arctic Ocean, and died at 32 years old on a mercy mission over Siberia in November 1929. His work transformed Alaska from a territory of isolated communities connected by dogsled into one where the airplane made distance irrelevant. Every bush operation flying Alaska today traces a direct line back to him.

Why Alaska Needed an Aviation Pioneer

In the early 1920s, Alaska’s interior was functionally unreachable. No roads connected its communities. The railroads reached Fairbanks and stopped. North, east, and west of that terminus, travel meant dog sled trails, river ice in winter, river mud in summer.

McGrath, a community 280 miles southwest of Fairbanks, might receive its mail in early spring - mail written months before. Communities spent much of every year entirely cut off from the outside world.

The airplane was not yet seen as a practical solution - it was a novelty, something belonging to air shows and wealthy sportsmen. Ben Eielson saw it differently.

Who Was Carl Ben Eielson?

Eielson was born in Hatton, North Dakota, in 1897. He learned to fly during World War I, training in Texas, but the Armistice came before he saw combat. After several years searching for direction, he arrived in Fairbanks in 1922 to teach school.

People who knew him described a quiet, methodical thinker. Not a barnstormer, not a showman. He would sit with a problem until he understood it completely, and then he would act. He looked at Alaska’s geography and saw the answer to a question the territory had been asking since its first settlers arrived.

The airplane was not a partial answer. It was the actual answer.

Alaska’s First Airmail Contract

Starting in 1922, Eielson began petitioning the United States Post Office with a case built on numbers. He knew the distances, the flight times, the cost comparisons. He knew that placing an airplane on the Fairbanks-to-McGrath run would collapse three weeks of dogsled travel into a morning’s work.

The Postal Service awarded him a contract in early 1924.

On February 7, 1924, Eielson climbed into a de Havilland biplane - an open-cockpit surplus aircraft from the war, with minimal instrumentation and no heat - and departed Fairbanks. The temperature that morning was approximately 50 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.

He flew to McGrath in 3 hours and 45 minutes. The same mail, by dogsled, would have arrived roughly three weeks later.

The Postal Service gave him a full season of contract flights. He flew through ice forming on struts and wing surfaces, oil congealing in temperatures that made every engine start a small victory, and navigation over snow-covered terrain that offered almost nothing for visual reference.

Then the Post Office, deciding from Washington, declined to renew the contract. Eielson kept flying.

The First Aerial Crossing of the Arctic Ocean

While continuing commercial and charter work in Alaska, Eielson connected with Hubert Wilkins, an Australian explorer who had already survived expeditions to both poles and had a defining ambition: fly across the Arctic Ocean from Alaska to Europe over the top of the world.

No one had done it. The challenges were severe - navigating over open water fatal to a downed crew within minutes, using magnetic compasses that grew unreliable near the pole, in an era when instrument flying was still developing its practitioners’ trust.

Wilkins needed the best Arctic pilot he could find. He found Eielson.

They made two attempts before success. The first, in 1927, ended with engine trouble and deteriorating weather. They prepared more carefully and returned.

On April 15, 1928, Eielson and Wilkins departed Point Barrow, Alaska in a Lockheed Vega - a compact wooden monoplane with a single radial engine - bound for Spitsbergen, Norway. The route covered 2,200 miles of Arctic Ocean.

The cockpit they shared for those hours was an exercise in sensory endurance: the continuous noise of a radial engine at full power, cold working through every seal and seam, ice accumulating on surfaces in ways modern pilots have instruments to detect, navigation by dead reckoning and compass and stars when the overcast broke. Below them, the water was black where the ice wasn’t, and both were equally unsurvivable.

Twenty hours and twenty minutes after leaving Barrow, they landed at Green Harbour, Spitsbergen - the first men to cross the Arctic Ocean by air.

Eielson received the Harmon Trophy and the Distinguished Flying Cross. King George V knighted Wilkins. Aviation publications on both sides of the Atlantic celebrated the achievement.

Eielson went back to Alaska and back to work.

Building Alaska Airways

By 1929, Eielson had formed Alaska Airways and was building scheduled air service across the territory. At 32 years old, he was by any measure the most respected Arctic pilot alive - and was making real the connected Alaska he had always believed was possible.

The airplane was doing what roads and railroads could not.

The Nanuk: A Mercy Mission in November Ice

In the fall of 1929, a trading schooner called the Nanuk, owned by fur trader Olaf Swenson, became trapped in pack ice near North Cape, Siberia. The ice had closed around her in late October. By early November, with roughly a dozen crew and passengers aboard, it was clear the ship would not move until spring.

Being icebound is not sinking - but an Arctic winter is a long time to be trapped with limited supplies and no means of evacuation.

Swenson requested rescue flights. Eielson organized the effort from Nome, identifying aircraft and pilots, making reconnaissance flights across the Bering Sea to assess conditions. The Bering is roughly 200 miles across at its narrowest point - narrow by Arctic standards, but not safe in November, when weather systems build fast and change without warning.

On November 9, 1929, Eielson and his mechanic, Earl Borland, flew to the Nanuk in a Hamilton Metalplane, a high-wing aluminum monoplane designed for exactly the kind of utility hauling they were doing. They reached the ship, offloaded cargo, and turned back toward Alaska.

Somewhere between the Nanuk and the Alaskan coast, marginal weather became something that left no room for error. Blowing snow. Whiteout. The kind of conditions where the horizon disappears entirely, where every instrument demands complete trust because every physical sense is providing false information. The only path through is to hold the needles steady and wait for the white to break.

The white did not break.

The Search on the Siberian Coast

The search that began the following day was the largest coordinated air search in Alaska’s history to that point. Pilots came from across the territory.

Harold Gillam flew - a pilot who had built his reputation on flying in conditions that grounded everyone else. Joe Crosson flew, a young California-born pilot who had come to Alaska several years earlier and become one of the territory’s finest. Others came because there was no question of not coming. Eielson was one of their own.

They flew in conditions nearly as dangerous as what had taken Eielson down. Week after week, through December and into January, following every lead, checking every stretch of coastline, fighting weather that was only intermittently willing to let them work.

Joe Crosson found the wreck in January 1930. On the tundra of the Siberian coast, half-buried in drifted snow, the Hamilton Metalplane lay scattered across the ground. Eielson and Borland had been killed on impact.

Crosson was 26 years old. He had known Eielson for years. Those who knew Crosson said the flight back to Nome - carrying his friend and mentor in the cargo of another airplane - changed something in him that never fully changed back.

Eielson’s Lasting Legacy

Alaska mourned with genuine depth. A major air installation near Fairbanks was named in his honor. Eielson Air Force Base carries that name today. Schools and streets across the state do as well.

The fuller monument is Alaska aviation itself. Every bush operation working a remote airstrip. Every floatplane settling onto a lake with no road nearby. Every cargo flight bringing supplies to a village that would otherwise wait for the river to freeze or the river to thaw. Every scheduled service connecting communities that have no other connection.

All of it runs a direct line back to the schoolteacher from Hatton, North Dakota who arrived in Fairbanks in 1922, looked at a map of the territory, and understood that the airplane was the answer to the question Alaska had been asking.

He was 32 years old when the Siberian ice took him. He didn’t live to see how completely he had been right.

Key Takeaways

Eielson flew Alaska’s first airmail route on February 7, 1924, completing Fairbanks-to-McGrath in 3 hours 45 minutes - a journey that took dogsled teams roughly three weeks.
On April 15, 1928, Eielson and Hubert Wilkins made the first aerial crossing of the Arctic Ocean, flying 2,200 miles from Point Barrow to Spitsbergen, Norway in 20 hours and 20 minutes.
Eielson died on November 9, 1929, during a mercy mission to evacuate passengers from the ice-trapped schooner Nanuk off the coast of Siberia.
Joe Crosson discovered the wreck of the Hamilton Metalplane in January 1930, concluding the largest coordinated air search in Alaska’s history to that point.
Eielson Air Force Base near Fairbanks preserves his name, but his real monument is Alaska’s bush aviation network - the practical realization of what he argued was possible in 1922.