Charles and Anne Lindbergh's flight "North to the Orient"

In the spring of 1931, Anne Lindbergh was issued her private pilot license after training in a Bird biplane on Long Island, New York During 1931 the Lindberghs prepared for their survey flight to the Orient. The purpose of this flight was to scout the great circle course, the fastest route from New York to Tokyo, for use in commercial air routes. Their aircraft was the Lockheed Sirius, with a single 600-horsepower radial engine, and was fitted with pontoons for water landings on the long-range flights. The fuel range was 2,000 miles

The survey flight to the Orient departed July 27, 1931, from Long Island, New York. Their itinerary through Canada included Ottawa, Moose Factory and Churchill on Hudson Bay, and Baker Lake in the Northwest Territories (Anne was the first white woman to set foot there). In Ottawa, her husband proudly proclaimed his wife was "crew" in response to a local aviator's statement that he wouldn't want his own wife as a passenger through the uncharted no man's land of the Canadian tundra. After a 12-hour night flight north from Baker Lake, through a never darkening sky in the land of the midnight sun, they arrived on the fifth of August at Aklavik on the Mackenzie River delta. Their next stop was Point Barrow, the northernmost tip of Alaska, at the Arctic Ocean.

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The foregoing was excerpted from the Charles Lindbergh website, which can be viewed at: http://www.charleslindbergh.com/history/orient.asp for a continuation of the story.