that Fokker had spent the war years in Germany building planes for the Germans. He had even taken out German citizenship. As part of his commitment to German air superiority, he had invented the synchronized machine gun, which enabled bullets to pass between the spinning blades of a propeller. Before this, amazingly, all that aircraft manufacturers could do was wrap armor plating around the propellers and hope that any bullets that struck the blades weren’t deflected backward. The only alternative was to mount the guns away from the propeller, but that meant pilots couldn’t reload them or clear jams, which were frequent. Fokker’s gun gave German pilots a deadly advantage for some time, making him probably responsible for more Allied deaths than any other individual. Now, however, he insisted that he had never actually been on Germany’s side. “My own country remained neutral throughout the entire course of the great conflict, and in a definite sense, so did I,” he wrote in his postwar autobiography, Flying Dutchman . He never explained in what sense he thought himself neutral, no doubt because there wasn’t any sense in which he was.
Byrd never liked Fokker, and on April 16, 1927, their enmity became complete. Just before six in the evening, Fokker and three members of the Byrd team—the copilot Floyd Bennett, the navigator George Noville, and Byrd himself—eagerly crowded into the cockpit. Fokker took the controls for this maiden flight. The plane took off smoothly and performed faultlessly in the air, but as the America came in to land it became evident that it was impelled by the inescapable burden of gravity to tip forward and come down nose-first. The problem was that all the weight was up front and there was no way for any of the four men onboard to move to the back to redistribute the load because a large fuel tank entirely filled the middle part of the fuselage.
Fokker circled around the airfield while he considered his options (or, rather, considered that he had no options) and came in to land as gingerly as he could. What exactly happened next became at once a matter of heated dispute. Byrd maintained that Fokker abandoned the controls and made every effort to save himself, leaving the others to their fates. Fokker vehemently denied this. Jumping out of a crashing plane was not possible, he said. “Maybe Byrd was excited and imagined this,” Fokker wrote with pained sarcasm in his autobiography. Surviving film footage of the crash, which is both brief and grainy, shows the plane landing roughly, tipping onto its nose, and flopping onto its back, all in a continuous motion, like a child doing a somersault. Fokker, like the other occupants, could have done nothing but brace and hold on.
In the footage the damage looks slight, but inside all was violent chaos. A piece of propeller ripped through the cockpit and pierced Bennett’s chest. He was bleeding profusely and critically injured. Noville, painfully mindful of the fire that had killed two of Fonck’s men, punched his way out through the plane’s fabric covering. Byrd followed and was so furious with Fokker that he reportedly failed to notice that his left arm had snapped like a twig and was dangling in a queasily unnatural way. Fokker, uninjured, stood and shouted back at Byrd, blaming him for overloading the plane on its first flight.
The episode introduced serious rancor into the Byrd camp and set back the team’s plans by weeks. Bennett was rushed to a hospital at Hackensack, where he lay close to death for the next ten days. He was lost to the team for good. The plane had to be almost completely rebuilt—and indeed extensively redesigned to allow the weight to be distributed more sensibly. For the time being, the Byrd team was out of the running.
That left two other American planes, but fate, alas, was not on their sides either. On April 24, eight days after the Byrd crash, Clarence Chamberlin was prevailed upon to take the