the way it was
The Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen is best known as the first man to reach the South Pole, a feat he achieved in 1911 after a grueling 56-day march over the icy. Others had sought to reach the earth’s northernmost point before this, including an ill-fated 1897 attempt by three Swedes in a hot-air balloon. Amundsen himself had tried to fly over the pole by plane just a few years earlier. But the , a 106-meter-long dirigible modified for flight in arctic weather, proved the ideal vessel. And so on May 11, 1926, the airship left its hanger at Ny-Ålesund in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago and glided off with 16 men on board. They made history the next morning when the passed over the North Pole, and set another record (as the first aircraft to traverse the polar ice cap between Europe and America) two days later with a successful landing in Teller, Alaska. And if all of that sounds like a distant chapter of history, then you haven’t heard of OceanSky Cruises, a Swedish aviation company that aims to put the North Pole back on the map with dirigible trips of its own. Using a state-of-the-art (and still-in-development) hybrid airship, the two-night flights will offer luxuries that the crew of the could only have dreamed about, including eight en-suite cabins, a restaurant, and a bar. But the biggest draw is something not even Amundsen achieved: a six-hour layover at the North Pole itself. Don’t start packing just yet, though: the first flights won’t happen till at least 2024, and they won’t come cheap — the cost of a cabin is expected to be upward of US$230,000.
