| Summary: | Arctic Planes Will Fly Today: Exceptional Warm Weather In Fairbanks May Delay Takeoff Over Snow./ Will Leave March 21./Wilkins Say He Will Be Back In New York In April Via North Pole. ARCTIC PLANES WILL FLY TODAY Exceptional Warm Weather in Fairbanks May Delay Takeoff Over Snow. WILL LEAVE MARCH 21 Wilkins Say He Will Be Back In New York in April via North Pole. By Palmer Hutchinson, special correspondent of The Spokesman-Review and the North American Newpaper Alliance with the Detroit Arctic expedition. Copyright, 1926, by North American Newspaper Alliance. FAIRBANKS, Alaska, March 10.— The three-motored Fokker monoplane In which Captain George H. Wilkins plans to make most of the Detroit arctic expedition's flights over the Polar sea, was hauled out of the Fairbanks hangar today and parked on. the flying, field alongside its sister ship. Both planes are ready for the first test flights. The initial air testing will be done tomorrow unless the warm weather continues and softens the snow of the long straight-away south of the town. The thermometer rose to 40 degrees above zero yesterday and the men found it uncomfortably warm for heavy physical work. Before the motors are started tomorrow the members of the expedition and the citizens of Fairbanks will hold a christening ceremony at which the are. sponsoring the expedition and the three-motored plane will be named the Detroiter and the smaller Liberty-motored ship the Alaska. The Detroiter will be christened by Mrs. Emma DeLaVerne, wife of the mayor of Fairbanks, and the Alaskan by Miss Genevieve Parker of Fairbanks Miss Parker was nominated by the citizens here because she drove her Siberian huskies to victory last Sunday in the Alaska women's dog team races. Smaller Will Do Freighting. The names of the two ships were chosen by Captain Wilkins, one because people of the city of Detroit are sponsoring the expedition and the other because the single-engined plane will be the freighting between Fairbanks and Point Barrow, 900 miles away on the shores of the Arctic ocean. In this service it will make many flights over the uncharted mountains of northern Alaska, an area that all the members of the expedition believe more perilous from the standpoint of forced landings than any part of the Polar sea. The final assembly work on the three-motored ship was not completed without effort. It was found that the metal cowling for the air-cooled engines did not fit, and the men of the party rebuilt it. They worked 48 hours cutting with hammers and cold chisels and filing it to shape before Captain Wilkins was satisfied that the cowling would protect the engines against the lowest arctic temperature. Will Hop Off March 21. Fairbanks, Alaska, March 10. (/P)--Captain George E. Wilkins, head of an Arctic airplane expedition, announced today that he will hop off from Fairbanks March 21. He predicted he will be in New York next month, after a flight over the Arctic wastes from Point Barrow, Alaska, to Spitzbergen. Captain Wilkins declared that no social engagements for his flight party will be accepted after March 18. His men have been working 11 hours a day assembling the planes.
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