The Polar Expedition of July 1931

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The Graf Zeppelin visits Brooklyn

Throughout 1930 and 1931 DELAG sought to make the Graf Zeppelin profitable. She made several transatlantic sailings to New York and made several more circuits of the Mediterranean basin. She also visited several European capitals such as London.

 

The Graf Zeppelin visits Tripoli in Libya. She is dumping ballast prior to landing

In 1931, the Graf Zeppelin was leased out by a multinational Polar Exploratory Group. Among the group was Lincoln Ellsworth who had flown on Amundsen's Norge. The zeppelin carried, among other things, nearly 12,000 pounds of emergency gear in the event of a crash.

The Graf Zeppelin passes through a cloudbank over New York City during its first transatlantic sailing. DELAG tried desperately to make its airline, reduced to just one ship, viable during the Great Depression

In July of that year the Graf Zeppelin carried a team of scientists from Germany, the United States, the Soviet Union, and Sweden on an exploration of the Arctic. Her goals were the mapping and geographic exploration of poorly charted Arctic areas, meteorological observations of the upper air of the North Polar region, and measurement of the earth’s magnetic field near the Pole.

From July 24th to July 31st, the Expedition charted the mouths of several large Russian rivers that fed into the Arctic Ocean including the Yenisei and the Ob. It determined accurately the coastline of Siberia. And it proved conclusively that Novaya Zemlya, a geographically long and narrow Russian territory was two islands divided by a strait and not just one stretch of land.

The Arctic terrain as viewed from the Graf Zeppelin during the Polar Expedition

At its highest latitude, the Graf Zeppelin reached Crown Prince Rudolf Island, less than 500 miles from the North Pole. It would turn out to be the last polar flight ever made by an airship.

The Graf Zeppelin met with the Russian icebreaker Malygin. The Malygin transferred 50,000 pieces of mail franked in the Stalinist U.S.S.R., that are now priceless to serious collectors. Again, the world's philatelists had funded a groundbreaking and historic voyage.

A Soviet-franked piece of mail from the 1931 Polar Expedition