Kiwi leading search for Amundsen's lost plane

Photo / Glenn Jeffrey

A veteran New Zealand polar expedition leader is heading a team searching for the final resting place of the first man to the South Pole, Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen.

Rob McCallum will use a remote-operated underwater vehicle to search for a submerged plane which went down while carrying Amundsen in the Arctic.

Between 1910 and 1912, Amundsen led the first expedition to reach the South Pole, reaching the target some five weeks before his British rival Robert Falcon Scott, who died on his return journey.

Amundsen was aboard a Latham 47 seaplane when the aircraft disappeared over the sea on its way to the Arctic island of Spitsbergen in 1928.

On June 18, 1928, Amundsen joined a rescue operation to save another rival, Umberto Nobile.

The Italian aviator crashed his airship Italia on a return voyage from the North Pole. Nobile and his surviving crew members were drifting helplessly on pack ice.

Amundsen boarded a Latham 47 seaplane with a team of French Air Force pilots to try to reach them.

According to experts involved in the new search, the Latham 47 would have been about 35km south of Bear Island when its last radio message was picked up.

Mr McCallum, the former head of the Department of Conservation's Auckland conservancy, is taking with him Nicolay Jacobsen, a great-nephew of Amundsen.

The Norwegian Navy vessel Tyr and its larger supply vessel, the Norwegian Coast Guard ship Harstadt will help in the search.

They will scour 117sq km of sea floor using a remote-control underwater vehicle called Hugin 1000, which can make high-resolution maps of the seabed, and download them when it is recovered each 12 hours.

The Tyr will also use a tethered remote-operated vehicle equipped with an high-definition TV camera.

A camera crew from German production company Context TV will be filming the search efforts for a documentary about Amundsen.

In August 1928, during the original rescue operation for Amundsen and the French crew, the left wing pontoon of the Latham 47 plane was recovered from the sea, and a piece of the fuel tank was found a couple of months later near Trondheim in Norway.

A veteran of several seasons expedition cruising in the Antarctic, including a full circumnavigation of the continent in 2001, Mr McCallum was expedition leader for the 2005 RMS Titanic Expedition.

- NZPA