Airship Norge leaves Ny-Ålesund

The airship Norge left Ny- Ålesund in Kongsfjorden on 11 May 1926 on the Amundsen-Ellsworth-Nobile Transpolar Flight. Helge Ingstad's book of 1948 records that the airship crossed the polar basin to Point Barrow in Alaska and then flew on to Teller. Ingstad calls it an entirely successful crossing of the polar area.

According to Ingstad, two expeditions lay at the coal town in the spring of 1926: the Amundsen-Ellsworth-Nobile expedition with Norge, in which Roald Amundsen took part, and the American Richard Byrd's expedition with the aeroplane Josefine Ford. Both were bound for the pole, but the airship was to go farther, across the polar basin to Alaska. Byrd started on 9 May with Floyd Bennet as pilot, reached the pole and returned. Norge started two days later.

The flight followed an earlier start from the same place. Ingstad writes that on 21 May 1925 Amundsen set out from Kongsfjorden with two Dornier Wal flying boats, with the pole as the goal. Lincoln Ellsworth had in the main paid for that expedition, and the airmen Hjalmar Riiser-Larsen and Leif Dietrichson took part. The aircraft landed in the drift ice at 87 degrees 43 minutes north. The expedition stayed there for three weeks, and then one machine was got into the air and flew back to Svalbard. Kjell Fjørtoft's history of 1995, Kongen av Sassen Bay, also gives 21 May 1925 as the day of departure and says that the whole world followed the expedition. When the aircraft did not return at the agreed time, he writes, the world press was full of speculation. Store norske leksikon says that in the 1920s Ny-Ålesund was at the centre of international media attention because of expeditions towards the North Pole.

Fjørtoft writes that it was Umberto Nobile who designed Norge and who flew it across the polar basin in 1926. He adds that the relationship between Amundsen and Nobile was hostile from the time of that flight.

The lexicon says that the mast built for Amundsen's airship expedition and remains of the large hangar are important cultural monuments in Ny-Ålesund now. In its section on the cultural heritage of the settlement, the lexicon says that Ny-Ålesund has 27 automatically protected buildings, in addition to other monuments, among them the airship mast. Liv Balstad's book of 1955 notes that a small stone stands near the remains of the old Norge hangar, as a memorial to the flight of Amundsen and Ellsworth over the polar sea in 1925.