Sirr George Hubert Wilkins, (born October 31, 1888, Mount Bryan East, South Australia, Australia—died December 1, 1958, Framingham, Massachusetts, U.S.), Australian-born British explorer who advanced the use of the airplane and pioneered the use of the submarine for polar research. He, along with American aviator Carl Ben Eielson, are noted for having made the first transpolar flight across the Arctic by airplane as well as the first airplane flight over a portion of Antarctica, both occurring in 1928. Wilkins studied engineering and photography in Australia before leaving for Britain in 1908. He learned to fly in 1910–12. In 1913–16 he accompanied the overland expedition of explorer-ethnologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson in the Canadian Arctic as official photographer. Following military service as a photographer during and after World War I, he served as second in command of the British Antarctic expedition to Graham Land on the Antarctic Peninsula (1920–21), and he also was a naturalist on Sir Ernest Shackleton’s last Antarctic expedition (1921–22). His polar explorations were interrupted when he led a British Museum biological expedition to tropical Australia in 1923–25. In 1926 Wilkins and Eielson began a series of trial flights to test the feasibility of air exploration of the then-unknown Arctic region north of Point Barrow, Alaska. On April 15–16, 1928, he and Eielson flew over unknown seas from Point Barrow to the Svalbard (Spitsbergen) archipelago north of Norway, completing the 2,200-mile (3,550-km) journey in about 20 1/2 hours. For this feat he was knighted two months later. In the Antarctic (December 20, 1928), he and Eielson flew some 600 miles (970 km) south. from Deception Island in the South Shetland Islands and across Graham Land, in the process discovering several new islands. It was hard to pick what photos to post. There are many online and the archives. Click on each picture for detail
Posted on: Wed, 17 Dec 2014 09:21:55 +0000
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