Carl Ben Eielson, the North Dakota Schoolteacher Who Flew Alaska's First Airmail in an Open-Cockpit de Havilland and Then Vanished Over the Siberian Ice

Carl Ben Eielson was a North Dakota schoolteacher who became one of the most important bush pilots in history. In February 1924 he flew Alaska’s first airmail in an open-cockpit de Havilland DH-4, cutting a three-week dog-team journey to under three hours. He later made the first flight across the top of the world before dying in a 1929 crash on the Siberian ice at age 32.

Who Was Carl Ben Eielson?

Eielson was not a grizzled frontiersman. He was a farm kid from Hatton, North Dakota, born in 1897. He learned to fly in the U.S. Army during the First World War, earning his wings just as the war ended, so he never saw combat - he flew Curtiss “Jenny” trainers around Texas and fell in love with aviation.

In 1922 he moved north to Fairbanks, Alaska, to teach high school general science. He lasted about a year in the classroom. He couldn’t stop talking about airplanes, and he soon talked local businessmen into pooling money for a war-surplus Curtiss JN-4 Jenny, launching the first real airplane operation in Alaska’s interior with sightseeing and passenger hops.

Why Did Alaska Need Airmail So Badly?

In the 1920s, Alaska was enormous and nearly empty. If you lived in a gold camp at McGrath or a trading post on the Yukon, mail arrived by dog team. In winter, a letter could take three weeks to travel a few hundred miles - the speed of a tired dog through the snow.

That delay governed everything: a doctor’s answer for a sick child, a bank draft, news that someone had died. Eielson looked at that gap and saw a problem an airplane could solve.

How Did Eielson Fly Alaska’s First Airmail?

Eielson traveled to Washington and pitched the Post Office Department directly. Against the odds, he walked out with an experimental airmail contract: the government would lend him an aircraft and pay him by the trip to fly mail from Fairbanks to McGrath - about 280 miles each way.

The aircraft was a de Havilland DH-4, a war-surplus biplane with a 400-horsepower Liberty engine and two open cockpits. Eielson usually flew alone, with the mail stuffed in the forward cockpit where a gunner once sat. There was no heater, no cabin, and no brakes worth the name. Pilots flew in reindeer-skin parkas, faces greased against frostbite, and often couldn’t feel the control stick after an hour aloft.

He also flew with no radio, no weather briefing, and no navigation aids beyond a compass and the rivers below. For much of the year those rivers were white on white under a white sky - a whiteout that can erase the horizon on a clear day. His runways were frozen rivers and sandbars, and any breakdown had to be fixed on the spot with bare hands or not at all.

On February 21, 1924, Eielson loaded the DH-4 with a sack of mail and flew from Fairbanks toward McGrath. The trip that took a dog team nearly three weeks, he completed in under three hours. He flew several more mail runs that winter, proving the concept repeatedly.

What Happened to the Airmail Experiment?

Eielson eventually came down hard on one flight, damaging the landing gear and the aircraft. The government looked at the cost and cancelled the experiment, deciding Alaska wasn’t ready for airmail. Time proved them wrong, but for the moment Eielson was grounded and out of a contract.

He didn’t quit - and he had caught the attention of the Australian explorer Sir George Hubert Wilkins.

The First Flight Across the Top of the World

Wilkins wanted to fly clear across the Arctic Ocean, from Alaska over the polar region to Europe - more than a thousand miles of drifting, uncharted sea ice with no land beneath it. He needed a pilot who understood cold and total self-reliance, and he chose Eielson.

Their aircraft was a Lockheed Vega, something genuinely new: a smooth wooden monocoque fuselage, a strutless cantilever wing, and - crucially - an enclosed cockpit. For a man who had flown Alaska bare-faced at 40 below, the Vega’s cabin was a revolution.

In April 1928, Eielson and Wilkins took off from Point Barrow at the top of Alaska and flew out over the polar sea toward Spitsbergen, off the coast of Norway - a distance of more than 2,000 miles. Near the end, a blizzard closed in. Low on fuel, Eielson landed the Vega on a small frozen island and rode out a five-day storm with the aircraft before digging it out and finishing the crossing.

It was the first flight across the top of the world. Wilkins was knighted, and Eielson - the farm boy - received the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Harmon Trophy. The pair then flew the same Vega over unmapped ice in Antarctica.

Eielson’s Airline and the Last Flight

At 31, famous and decorated, Eielson could have retired to the lecture circuit. Instead he came home and founded Alaskan Airways, a full operation with mechanics, a fleet, and freight, passenger, and mail service - building the very future he had proven possible in a battered DH-4.

In November 1929, a trading ship called the Nanuk lay frozen in the sea ice off North Cape on the Siberian coast, loaded with a fortune in furs and stranded passengers. Someone had to fly across the Bering Sea into Soviet Siberia in the dead of winter to bring the cargo and people out. The job fell to Eielson.

He flew with a young mechanic named Earl Borland. After one successful round trip, the two set out again for the Nanuk on November 9, 1929, into worsening weather - and then there was silence. With no radio, no one could call, and the territory slowly realized Eielson was down somewhere on the Siberian ice.

The Search and the Legacy

What followed was one of aviation’s great searches. Through the polar winter, pilots from Alaska and Soviet fliers from the other side put their aircraft into the same deadly weather for weeks. Two nations that agreed on almost nothing agreed on this.

In January 1930, searchers found the wreckage. Eielson and Borland had flown into a whiteout near the Siberian shore and struck the frozen ground at speed. Eielson was 32 years old.

His most visible monument is Eielson Air Force Base outside Fairbanks, where fighters and tankers launch every day from a field named for a former schoolteacher. But his real legacy is the idea he flew into being: every load of groceries into a roadless village, every medevac out of the bush, every birthday card that arrives the same week it was mailed. Eielson proved that the airplane could shrink Alaska to a size a person could live in - and it never grew back.

Key Takeaways

• Carl Ben Eielson, a North Dakota schoolteacher born in 1897, flew Alaska’s first airmail on February 21, 1924, in an open-cockpit de Havilland DH-4.
• His Fairbanks-to-McGrath run cut a three-week dog-team journey to under three hours, transforming life in Alaska’s interior.
• In April 1928, he and Sir Hubert Wilkins made the first flight across the top of the world in a Lockheed Vega, earning Eielson the Distinguished Flying Cross and Harmon Trophy.
• He founded Alaskan Airways but died in 1929 at age 32 when his aircraft hit a whiteout over the Siberian ice during a rescue supply mission for the trapped ship Nanuk.
• Eielson Air Force Base near Fairbanks is named in his honor, but his lasting legacy is modern Alaskan aviation itself.