Over the Ice Cap

At Goose Bay, Labrador, one day last week Lieut. Colonel Bert Raymond John ("Fish") Hassell. C.O. of the Air Transport Command base there, stood on the mile-long runway, waved goodbye to another batch of bombers headed over Greenland's icecap for Europe. Said he: "There they go, doing what I didn't do."

In 1928 "Fish" Hassell, then a barnstormer, tried to show that it was easier to fly to Europe via the North Atlantic route than any other way. He borrowed money at his home-town bank in Rockford, Ill., took off in a Stinson single-engine monoplane. He refueled in Ontario, headed for Greenland. He made it, but not where he had planned, and was forced to land on the icecap. He walked out, leaving his wrecked plane behind him. Two months ago an Army pilot spotted an old crate sitting on the icecap. He circled and took pictures. "Fish" identified his property. In 16 years the moving ice of Greenland's perpetual glacier had failed to swallow Hassell's plane.

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