Hjalmar Riiser-Larsen
Hjalmar Riiser-Larsen (
June 7,
1890 –
June 3,
1965) was a
Norwegian aviation pioneer,
polar explorer and businessman. Among his achievements, he is generally regarded as the founder of the
Royal Norwegian Air Force.
Riiser-Larsen was born in
Oslo, Norway, in 1890. In 1909, aged nineteen, he joined the
Norwegian Naval Academy and in 1915 the newly-formed Naval Air Force. After
World War I, he served as the acting head of the Naval Air Force's factory until a more senior officer was appointed. In 1921, he joined the Aviation Council, then part of the
Norwegian Ministry of Defence, as a secretary. This gave him the opportunity to study the fledgling military and civil aviation infrastructure for which the Council was responsible. He also became a frequent pilot on the air routes used by the new aviation companies.
Flying over the North Pole
Riiser-Larsen's years of polar exploration began in 1925 when his compatriot
Roald Amundsen, the famed polar explorer, asked him to be his deputy and pilot for an attempt to fly over the
North Pole. Riiser-Larsen agreed and secured the use of two
Dornier Do J seaplanes. The expedition, however, was forced to land close to the Pole, badly damaging one of the planes. After twenty-six days on an
ice shelf, shovelling six hundred tons of snow to create an airstrip, the expedition's six members squeezed themselves into the remaining plane. Riiser-Larsen somehow managed to coax the overloaded plane into the air and flew the expedition home safely.
The following year, Riiser-Larsen rejoined Amundsen for another attempt to fly over the Pole, this time with Italian aeronautical engineer
Umberto Nobile in his recently-renamed
airship, the
Norge. Leaving
Spitsbergen on May 11, 1926, the
Norge completed the crossing two days later, landing near
Teller, Alaska. The flight is considered by many to be the first successful flight over the North Pole, as the other claimants,
Frederick Cook,
Robert Peary and
Richard Byrd, were unable to verify their attempts in full.
In 1928, Riiser-Larsen became involved in searching the Arctic for Nobile after he had crashed while leading an Italian attempt to fly over the Pole. He also became involved in a search for Amundsen, when Amundsen's seaplane went missing while he was en route to join the search for Nobile. Eventually Nobile and his team were found, but Amundsen was not.
The Norvegia expeditions
The
Norvegia expeditions were a sequence of
Antarctic expeditions financed by the Norwegian shipowner and
whaling merchant
Lars Christensen during the late 1920s and 1930s. Ostensibly their goal was scientific research and the discovery of new whaling grounds, but Christensen also requested permission from the Norwegian Foreign Office to claim for Norway any unchartered territory that was found. By the end of the second expedition, two small islands in the
Southern Ocean,
Bouvet Island and
Peter I Island, had been annexed.
In 1929 Christensen decided to include aeroplanes in the next expedition and appointed Riiser-Larsen its leader. Riiser-Larsen then supervised and took part in mapping most of the Antarctic in this and three further expeditions. More territory was also annexed, this time the large area of the continent known as
Queen Maud Land.
In 1933, the Norwegian military was downsized and Riiser-Larssen was among those officers finding themselves out of work. However, he was quickly offered a new job by the shipping company
Fred. Olsen & Co. as manager of its newly-formed airline,
DNL. He invited some former naval pilots to join the airline and soon made it the most successful in Norway. In 1946, DNL would be one of the four
Scandinavian airlines merged to create the present-day
Scandinavian Airlines System (SAS).
When
Nazi Germany invaded Norway in 1940, Riiser-Larsen rejoined the Norwegian Naval Air Force. However, both the Norwegian Army and Naval Air Forces were quickly overwhelmed by the
Wehrmacht before he saw combat. Instead, he accompanied the Norwegian cabinet and military leaders into exile in London, before moving on to
Toronto,
Canada, to become the first commander of the Norwegian air forces' training camp, "
Little Norway".
At the beginning of 1941, Riiser-Larsen returned to London to take up the post of Commander in Chief of the Naval Air Force; then of the Combined Arms Air Force; and finally, in 1944, of the fully-amalgamated
Royal Norwegian Air Force. By the end of the war, however, many of the pilots under his command had become critical of his leadership. He resigned, bitterly, from the Air Force in 1946.
In 1947, Riiser-Larsen again became the head of DNL, a few months before it merged with
DDL,
SIL and
ABA to create
SAS. He then became an advisor to the SAS executive and a regional manager with responsibility for transcontinental air routes. One of these routes, although established after his retirement in 1955, represented the "fulfilment of a vision" : the route to North America over the North Pole.
Riiser-Larsen died on June 3, 1965, four days before his seventy-fifth birthday.
* Hjalmar Riiser-Larsen,
Femti År for Kongen (
Fifty Years for the King, Riiser-Larsen's autobiography), Oslo: Gyldendal Norsk Forlag, 1958.
