Admiral Byrd's 'Tin Goose'

I bought this one last Saturday purely for nostalgia reasons', For the princely sum of £3.73 including £2.69 shipping. LOL

I used to build planes when I was a kid of about nine, and just couldn't wait to get back home and get them started, and probably finished, the same day. Needless to say I couldn't wait to start this one the same day too. LOL

It's a very basic 1:77th kit with a few fit issues. However, considering the mold was made, I believe, in 1953, it's surprisingly good. Total build time I guess was no more than 4hours and boy does it show. Still it brought back sweet memories of my childhood days.

A little history about the naughty Admiral Byrd. Taken from Wikipediea:



Claimed North Pole flight, 1926

On May 9, 1926, Byrd and pilot Floyd Bennett attempted a flight over the North Pole in a Fokker F-VII Tri-motor called the Josephine Ford. This flight went from Spitsbergen (Svalbard) and back to its take-off airfield. Byrd claimed to have reached the Pole. This trip earned Byrd widespread acclaim, including being awarded the Medal of Honor (back when this medal was awarded for things other than superior valor in battle), and enabled him to secure funding for subsequent attempts to fly over the South Pole.

From 1926 until 1996, there were doubts, defenses, and heated controversy about whether or not Byrd actually reached the North Pole. In 1958 Norwegian-American aviator and explorer Bernt Balchen cast doubt on Byrd's claim based on his extensive personal knowledge of the airplane's speed. In 1971 Balchen speculated that Byrd had simply circled aimlessly while out of sight of land.[1]

The 1996 release of Byrd's diary of the May 9, 1926 flight revealed erased (but still legible) sextant sights that sharply differ with Byrd's later June 22 typewritten official report to the National Geographic Society. Byrd took a sextant reading of the Sun at 7:07:10 GCT. His erased diary record shows the apparent (observed) solar altitude to have been 19°25'30", while his later official typescript reports the same 7:07:10 apparent solar altitude to have been 18°18'18".[2] On the basis of this and other data in the diary, Dennis Rawlins concluded that Byrd steered accurately, and courageously flew about 80% of the distance to the Pole before turning back due to an engine oil leak, but later falsified his official report to support his claim of reaching the pole.[3]


The Fokker FVIIa/3M - "Josephine Ford", on display at The Henry Ford MuseumAccepting that the conflicting data in the typed report's flight times indeed require both northward and southward groundspeeds greater than the flight's 85 mph airspeed, a remaining Byrd defender posits a westerly-moving anti-cyclone that tailwind-boosted Byrd's groundspeed on both outward and inward legs, allowing the distance claimed to be covered in the time claimed. (The theory is based on rejecting handwritten sextant data in favor of typewritten alleged dead-reckoning data.)[4] This suggestion has been refuted by Dennis Rawlins[5] who adds[6] that the sextant data in the long unavailable original official typewritten report are all expressed to 1", a precision not possible on Navy sextants of 1926 and not the precision of the sextant data in Byrd's diary for 1925 or the 1926 flight, which was normal (half or quarter of a minute of arc). Some sources claim that Floyd Bennett and Byrd later revealed, in private conversations, that they did not reach the pole. One source claims that Floyd Bennett later told a fellow pilot that they did not reach the pole.[7]It is also claimed that Byrd confessed his failure to reach the North Pole during a long walk with Dr. Isaiah Bowman in 1930.[8]

Considering that Byrd and Bennett probably didn't reach the North Pole, it is extremely likely that the first flight over the Pole was the flight of the airship Norge in May 1926 with its crew of Roald Amundsen, Umberto Nobile, Oscar Wisting, and others. This flight went from Spitsbergen (Svalbard) to Alaska nonstop, so there is little doubt that they went over the North Pole. Amundsen and Wisting had both been members of the first expedition to the South Pole, December 1911.

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What a beauty, A Ford Tri-motor. They sold one of these at the Barrett-jackson a couple years ago. Super nice Al.

I've seen two of these in person. Almost got to go for a ride but it had oil pressure issues in one of the engine. Great work! I need to look for one of these kits to build that plane. :)