Eielson, << EYE uhl suhn, >> Carl Ben (1897-1929), an American aviator and explorer, piloted the first airplane to cross the Arctic Ocean. Eielson made the flight in April 1928 with the Australian explorer Hubert Wilkins, who organized the expedition. The pair flew 2,200 miles (3,540 kilometers) from Point Barrow, Alaska, to Spitsbergen, an island in the Arctic Ocean. In December 1928, Eielson and Wilkins made the first air explorations of Antarctica. They charted several unknown islands.
Eielson was born on July 20, 1897, in Hatton, North Dakota. He became a pilot in the United States Army Air Service in 1918. Eielson went to Fairbanks, Alaska, in 1922 to work as a high school teacher. He founded a commercial air service in Fairbanks in 1923 and set up the first airmail route in Alaska in 1924. Eielson died on Nov. 9, 1929, in a plane crash in Siberia while on a rescue mission.
