Carl Ben Eielson, the Nanuk Rescue Mission, and the Bering Sea That Swallowed Alaska's Greatest Bush Pilot

Carl Ben Eielson flew Alaska’s first airmail run in 1924, completed the first flight across the Arctic Ocean in 1928, and died over the Bering Sea on November 9, 1929 during a cargo rescue mission. He was 32 years old. His name now marks Eielson Air Force Base outside Fairbanks - woven into the ATIS broadcasts and sectional charts of the airspace he was the first to prove could be flown.

Who Was Carl Ben Eielson?

Eielson grew up in Hatton, North Dakota - flat farm country that gives a young man a lot of sky to think about. He earned his wings in the Army Air Service during World War I, then faced the same post-war reality as thousands of other trained military pilots: the war was finished, but the flying was not.

In 1922, he arrived in Fairbanks, Alaska to teach school and immediately understood the territory’s geography as a problem he could solve. In every direction lay mountains, rivers, and distances that swallowed travel times. A letter could take a month to reach a mining camp 300 miles away. Dog sled or riverboat covered in weeks what an airplane could cover in an hour.

Alaska’s First Airmail Run, 1924

Eielson campaigned for an airmail trial, arguing that air travel could provide in hours what dog sleds measured in weeks. He wore down the US Postal Service.

In January 1924, he lifted off from Fairbanks in a de Havilland DH-4 - a wartime surplus biplane with an open cockpit and a Liberty engine. He flew south across the Interior toward McGrath, over rivers and spruce forest that had seen very little aviation. The charts told him roughly where things were. His eyes and judgment told him the rest.

The temperature was minus 40 degrees. In an open cockpit, goggles ice over. You pull them up and let your face take the wind because seeing matters more than feeling.

He landed at McGrath. The first airmail run in Alaskan history was complete.

The Postal Service reviewed the numbers and canceled the contract. Eielson didn’t go home to North Dakota. He kept flying - freight for mining outfits, passengers between remote settlements, survey gear for Interior parties. He was building an aviation economy in a territory that otherwise moved on ice, river, and silence.

The First Flight Across the Arctic Ocean, 1928

By 1928, Eielson’s reputation had grown well beyond Alaska. That was when Hubert Wilkins, an Australian explorer with one of the most ambitious minds of the exploration age, arrived with a plan that produced a consistent reaction from serious aviators: how long do you expect to live?

Wilkins wanted to fly from Point Barrow, Alaska across the Arctic Ocean to Spitsbergen, Norway - 2,200 miles, the bulk of it over ice and open water with no airport, no fuel cache, and no rescue possible. Navigation over featureless pack ice meant a magnetic compass, a chart, and complete trust in dead reckoning. One engine failure over that water meant putting the airplane down on the ice and waiting - because nobody was coming.

Eielson signed on. They flew a Lockheed Vega, a high-wing monoplane with a single radial engine and extra fuel tanks fitted for the crossing.

On April 14, 1928, they lined up at Barrow in the Arctic dawn. Twenty hours and twenty minutes later, they touched down at Spitsbergen.

First flight across the Arctic Ocean. Ben Eielson was 30 years old.

The world went wild - medals, his photograph in papers from New York to London. Eielson came back to Alaska and went back to work.

The Nanuk Rescue Mission

By 1929, Eielson was flying for Alaskan Airways, one of the outfits competing to build commercial aviation in the territory. From the cockpit it looked less like frontier adventure and more like early mornings in brutal cold, careful preflights when your fingers barely worked, and landings on surfaces the word “runway” didn’t quite cover - gravel bars, frozen lakes, patches of tundra that looked level from altitude and were anything but.

That autumn, a trading schooner called the Nanuk sailed into serious trouble in the waters off northeastern Siberia. The Nanuk was a 100-foot wooden vessel built for Arctic work, running those waters for years buying furs from coastal villages. She was heavily loaded with prime Arctic fox and ermine - cargo the New York fur market put real money behind. She also had passengers who needed to reach home before winter closed everything shut.

The ice moved in faster than expected in October 1929. The Nanuk was caught in pack ice near Cape North on the Soviet side of the Bering Sea. The ice had her, and the ice intended to keep her.

Alaskan Airways got the rescue contract. Eielson took the work.

Each flight required crossing from Fairbanks to the Alaska coast, then 200 miles across the Bering Sea to the Soviet shore - open water and shifting pack ice. Find the ship from the air. Assess the ice surface for landing. Put the airplane down, load cargo or passengers, take off from the ice, and cross back. No weather radar. No GPS. No reliable radio contact over open water. Just a compass, an altimeter, the weather observed before departure, and the ability to read what the sea and sky were telling you once you were out there with no landmarks and no margin.

Eielson flew multiple crossings, each one a successful negotiation with the weather and the ice. His mechanic on the final runs was Earl Borland - careful, experienced, someone who knew the airplanes and trusted his pilot.

On November 9, 1929, Eielson and Borland loaded the last of the Nanuk’s cargo, lifted off from the ice near the trapped ship, pointed the nose toward Alaska, and vanished.

The Search: American and Soviet Pilots, Together

The search that followed was the largest aviation effort Alaska had ever mounted. Joe Crosson - one of the finest pilots in the territory and one of Eielson’s closest friends - flew. Other Alaskan Airways pilots flew. The territory put everything it had in the air.

Soviet pilots flew the search too.

In 1929, the United States had not yet formally recognized the Soviet government. The relationship between the two countries was cold in a way that had nothing to do with the weather. But when word came that an aircraft was down in Soviet territory with American airmen aboard, the Soviets sent pilots and aircraft. American and Soviet crews flew the same search, looking for the same men, in the same terrible conditions.

That cooperation - across a political divide, in some of the most hostile flying conditions on earth - reflects what aviation culture was in that era. When a pilot was down, you went. The paperwork could wait.

The search ran through December and into January. In January 1930, searchers found the wreckage on the Siberian coast near a headland called Cape Serdtse-Kamen, north of the Bering Strait. The airplane had flown into high ground.

The most probable cause was a whiteout. When the overcast is complete and the snow below is unbroken, light reflects identically from above and below. The horizon disappears. Sky and ground become one seamless white field with no depth, no shadow, no reference. At low altitude over sea ice - where a pilot on a cargo run across the Bering Sea would likely be - the ground comes up without any warning the eyes can register.

Eielson and Borland were both gone. Ben Eielson was 32 years old.

Why Eielson’s Legacy Still Matters

Fairbanks mourned him the way a community mourns someone essential to its survival - not a celebrity in the modern sense, but essential. The way you mourn your doctor or the man who runs the power station. He had proven the territory’s distances could be conquered by air. He had flown routes before there were routes.

His body was brought home to Hatton, North Dakota. Alaska made certain his name did not fade. In 1948, Ladd Field outside Fairbanks was renamed Eielson Air Force Base. His name is in the ATIS broadcasts, the radio calls, and the sectional charts covering the airspace he was the first to prove could be flown.

What Eielson and that generation of bush pilots were actually building was not adventure - it was infrastructure. Air routes connecting communities with no other way to reach each other. When he flew mail to McGrath in 1924, he was delivering mail to people who needed mail delivered. When he flew the Nanuk runs in 1929, he was extracting cargo and passengers from a situation that would otherwise have meant months of loss and hardship. Every airplane that landed at a remote settlement carried not just cargo but the possibility of connection to the world beyond the river and the mountain.

The history of the Nanuk rescue and the search for Eielson and Borland is documented in the Alaskan aviation archives at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Dermot Cole’s writing on early Alaskan aviation provides excellent context for anyone wanting to go deeper into this era.

Key Takeaways

Carl Ben Eielson flew Alaska’s first airmail run in January 1924, from Fairbanks to McGrath in a de Havilland DH-4 at minus 40 degrees.
On April 14, 1928, Eielson and Hubert Wilkins completed the first flight across the Arctic Ocean - 2,200 miles from Point Barrow to Spitsbergen in 20 hours and 20 minutes.
Eielson disappeared on November 9, 1929 while evacuating cargo and passengers from the ice-trapped trading schooner Nanuk near the Soviet Bering Sea coast.
The subsequent search was remarkable for American-Soviet aviation cooperation at a time when the two countries had no formal diplomatic relations.
Wreckage was found near Cape Serdtse-Kamen in January 1930; the probable cause was a whiteout over sea ice.
In 1948, Ladd Field near Fairbanks was renamed Eielson Air Force Base in his honor.