Carl Ben Eielson, the Schoolteacher Who Flew Alaska's First Airmail and Vanished on the Ice off Siberia

Carl Ben Eielson was a North Dakota schoolteacher who became the pioneer of Alaskan aviation, flying the territory’s first airmail route in 1924 and later making the first flight across the top of the world from America to Europe. In roughly seven years he proved the airplane could shrink a country that dog teams took a month to cross into an afternoon. He died at 32 when his aircraft crashed on the Siberian coast during a 1929 rescue mission, and today Eielson Air Force Base in interior Alaska carries his name.

Who Was Carl Ben Eielson?

Carl Ben Eielson was born in Hatton, North Dakota, and learned to fly during the First World War. He earned his wings but was never sent overseas, coming home with a permanent case of what pilots recognize instantly: the need to be in the air.

In 1922, at the age of 25, he took a teaching job in Fairbanks, Alaska. He brought his flying ambition with him into a territory that had almost no way of moving people or goods except by dog sled.

At the time, interior Alaska had no roads out and no meaningful railroad. Travel between towns meant hitching up a dog team and mushing for days or weeks through cold that could kill an unprepared traveler. It was a region the size of a continent, held together by dogs, rivers, and patience.

How Alaska’s First Airplane Operation Began

In 1922, Eielson persuaded a group of Fairbanks businessmen to invest in a war-surplus Curtiss trainer. He began flying passengers for money, launching the first real airplane operation in interior Alaska.

He was learning lessons no flight school had ever taught, because no flight school had ever needed to. He discovered what happens to an engine at 40 degrees below zero - how crankcase oil turns to cold molasses, and how a bush landing far from help could strand a pilot for good unless the oil was drained hot and kept warm by a fire.

There were no airports. Pilots landed on frozen rivers, sandbars, and stretches of tundra that trappers promised were smooth and often were not. Worse, large stretches of Alaska had never been surveyed from the air. The maps were literally blank white paper, meaning an engine failure could leave a pilot lost in country no one on earth could locate - including the pilot himself.

Flying Alaska’s First Airmail Route

The U.S. Post Office had been paying a fortune to move mail across Alaska by dog sled, and Washington wanted to know whether an airplane could do the job faster and cheaper.

In the winter of 1924, the government gave Eielson a contract and an aircraft: a de Havilland DH-4, a heavy war-surplus biplane with a Liberty engine and an open cockpit, originally built for the battlefields of France.

In February 1924, Eielson loaded the mail and flew the DH-4 from Fairbanks to McGrath, a distance of more than 280 miles across mountains and river valleys. He flew it wrapped in furs - a reindeer-skin parka, fur boots called mukluks, and a face mask - while the wind poured over an unheated cockpit and froze his breath onto the fur around his face.

The comparison was staggering. Dog teams took anywhere from a week to 20 days to reach McGrath. Eielson made the trip in a little under three hours.

The people of McGrath heard the Liberty engine and ran out onto the river ice to meet their mail, dropped from the sky.

What Ended the Airmail Contract?

Eielson flew the route through the winter, making roughly eight trips. Then one flight ended in a hard crash that wrecked the DH-4. He walked away, but the government grew nervous about the risk and the cost of the equipment and cancelled the contract, returning to dog sleds.

The demonstration could not be undone, though. All of Alaska had now seen mail arrive in an afternoon, and the idea that the airplane belonged in the North was permanently loose.

The First Flight Across the Top of the World

Eielson’s reputation reached Sir Hubert Wilkins, an Australian explorer who wanted to prove there was no undiscovered land in the Arctic Ocean - and to do it by air rather than by the deadly old dog-and-starvation expeditions. Wilkins needed a pilot who could operate with no airfields, no weather reports, no reliable radio, and temperatures that could crack steel. Eielson had been doing exactly that for a living.

In April 1928, the two took off from Point Barrow, Alaska, in a Lockheed Vega - a sleek wooden monoplane far ahead of its time - bound for Spitsbergen, Norway, on the far side of the North Pole.

They spent about 20 hours in the air over featureless ice, navigating by dead reckoning and the sun because a magnetic compass is useless that far north. Caught by weather near the end, Eielson landed the Vega on sea ice off Spitsbergen, waited out the storm for days, then dug the aircraft out and completed the final leg.

They became the first men to fly across the top of the world from America to Europe. Wilkins was knighted by the King of England, and Eielson received the Distinguished Flying Cross. The pair then flew a Vega over Antarctica, spotting land no human had ever seen.

Why Did Eielson Return to Alaska?

By 1929, Eielson was genuinely famous, in the way Charles Lindbergh was famous. He could have chosen lecture tours and a warm office in the lower 48. Instead, he went back to Alaska to run his aviation company and keep flying.

The Rescue Mission That Cost Eielson His Life

In the fall of 1929, a trading ship called the Nanuk became frozen fast in the ice off the coast of Siberia, across the Bering Strait. Her hold carried more than half a million dollars in furs, and her crew and passengers were trapped as the Arctic winter closed in.

Eielson answered the call. The plan was to fly across the Bering Strait, land on the ice beside the Nanuk, and ferry out the furs and people load by load before the deep cold shut everything down. He flew a Hamilton Metalplane, an all-metal monoplane, with his mechanic, a young man named Earl Borland.

After completing a trip or two, Eielson and Borland took off from the Alaska side on November 9, 1929, to make another crossing. They flew into weather and never came out of it - no radio call, no wreckage, no sign.

How Was Eielson Found?

The search that followed reveals how respected Eielson was. American pilots flew patterns off the Alaska coast, and the Soviets - despite deep tensions with the United States in 1929 - put their own pilots and men into the air and onto the ice to look for him. Among northern flyers, the code to always go searching ran deeper than any government rivalry.

In late January 1930, searchers found the Hamilton Metalplane wrecked in the snow on the frozen Siberian coast. It had been flown into the ground in bad weather. Eielson and Borland were found nearby.

Carl Ben Eielson was 32 years old. In about seven years, he had flown Alaska’s first airmail, crossed both the top and the bottom of the world, and shown an entire territory what aviation could do.

Eielson’s Lasting Legacy

Every bush pilot who lands a Cub or a Beaver on an Alaskan gravel bar flies in Eielson’s slipstream. Every load of medicine, every sick child flown to a hospital, and every mail sack delivered to a roadless village traces back to the schoolteacher who looked at a blank map and decided the airplane belonged there.

His name endures on Eielson Air Force Base in interior Alaska, where modern fighters take off from a field named for a man who once landed a war-surplus biplane on frozen rivers because there was nothing else to land on.

Key Takeaways

• Carl Ben Eielson was a North Dakota schoolteacher who founded interior Alaska’s first airplane operation in 1922 using a war-surplus Curtiss trainer.
• In February 1924, he flew Alaska’s first airmail from Fairbanks to McGrath - a 280-plus-mile route - in under three hours, versus 1 to 20 days by dog sled.
• In April 1928, Eielson and Sir Hubert Wilkins made the first flight across the Arctic from America to Europe in a Lockheed Vega, earning Eielson the Distinguished Flying Cross.
• Eielson died at age 32 on November 9, 1929, when his Hamilton Metalplane crashed during a rescue mission for the icebound ship Nanuk off Siberia; the wreck was found in late January 1930.
• Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska is named in his honor, and his work laid the foundation for modern Alaskan bush flying.