The Last Word from N-209: The Disappearance of Sigizmund Levanevsky and Crew on the Trans-Polar Flight, 13 August 1937

At Shchelkovo military airfield outside Moscow, on the morning of 12 August 1937, an experimental four-engine Bolkhovitinov DB-A painted red for Arctic visibility lifted off heavily into a summer sky. The aircraft carried the Aeroflot polar registration USSR-N209 at a takeoff weight of about 34,500 kg, roughly fifty per cent above the design maximum. The commander was Sigizmund Aleksandrovich Levanevsky, awarded Hero of the Soviet Union in 1934 for his part in the SS Chelyuskin rescue. He had five crew with him, and the aircraft was bound for Fairbanks, Alaska, over the North Pole.

The flight was the third in a sequence. The Chkalov crew had flown the polar route to Vancouver, Washington, on 18 to 20 June 1937; the Gromov crew had flown it to San Jacinto, California, on 12 to 14 July 1937. N-209 was meant to convert the propaganda program into a commercial proposition under Glavsevmorput, the Chief Administration of the Northern Sea Route.

The aircraft crossed the North Pole on 13 August 1937 at about 13:40 GMT. A little over an hour later, at about 14:48 GMT (17:58 Moscow time), N-209 sent its last full radio message. The Moscow Times preserves the wording: “The far-right engine has quit due to a problem with the oil system. Entering overcast skies. Elevation 4,600 meters. Will attempt a landing.” A handful of partial transmissions followed, including an undecoded numeric code reported variously as “3400” or “34, 36,” whose meaning has never been settled. Nothing confirmed came after.

The Soviet, American, and Canadian search through 1937 and into 1938, including roughly nine major flights by the Australian polar explorer Sir George Hubert Wilkins, covered an area the Moscow Times later described as the size of Montana. It found nothing. A 1999 sonar contact in Camden Bay turned out to be rock. Russian Geographic Society expeditions in 2011 and 2013 also found nothing. What became of Sigizmund Levanevsky and his five crew aboard USSR-N209 is still open.

The year of Soviet polar aviation

1937 was the high-water mark of Soviet polar aviation as a public spectacle. Two non-stop trans-polar flights had already succeeded that summer.

The Chkalov flight, 18 to 20 June 1937, ran in the single-engine Tupolev ANT-25 from Shchelkovo over the North Pole to Pearson Field at Vancouver, Washington, with Valery Chkalov, Georgy Baidukov, and Alexander Belyakov. The Gromov flight, 12 to 14 July 1937, ran in a sister ANT-25 with Mikhail Gromov, Andrei Yumashev, and Sergey Danilin to a dairy pasture near San Jacinto, California, covering about 11,500 km in 62 hours 17 minutes and setting a world non-stop distance record.

Levanevsky’s flight was conceived as more ambitious. Where Chkalov and Gromov had flown stripped single-engine machines, N-209 was a four-engine aircraft modified to carry passengers and freight, meant to argue, on behalf of Glavsevmorput, that a regular commercial trans-polar route between the Soviet Union and the United States was practical. The political weight on it was correspondingly heavier.

The aircraft and the crew

The aircraft type was the Bolkhovitinov DB-A, Dalniy Bombardirovshchik-Akademiya, “long-range bomber, academy.” It was not a Tupolev. The designer was Viktor Fyodorovich Bolkhovitinov (1899 to 1970), heading a team at the Zhukovsky Air Force Engineering Academy, drawing on the layout of Tupolev’s TB-3. First flight was on 2 May 1935 at Khodynka.

The polar airframe carried four M-34RN (or AM-34RN, after the 1936 Mikulin redesignation; both labels appear in the literature) liquid-cooled V-12 piston engines of approximately 900 hp each. Wingspan was about 39.5 m, length about 24.4 m, service ceiling about 7,200 to 7,700 m, and range in production configuration about 4,500 km. The Aeroflot polar registration was USSR-N209, painted in Cyrillic as Н-209. The aircraft was modified for the trans-polar attempt with extra fuel tanks, cabin heating, an enhanced long-range radio, de-icing equipment, and a red paint scheme. It flew at an overload weight of approximately 34,700 kg against a design maximum takeoff weight of about 22,000 kg.

The crew of six is recorded across Soviet and English-language sources. Romanization varies; the forms below follow the most common scholarly conventions.

Sigizmund Aleksandrovich Levanevsky, commander, was born on 15 May 1902 in St. Petersburg of Polish family origin and was 35 in August 1937, awarded Hero of the Soviet Union in 1934 for the Chelyuskin rescue. Nikolai Georgievich Kastanaev, second pilot, was a graduate of the Borisoglebsk military pilot school in 1926 and a test pilot for the DB-A at Aircraft Plant No. 22 (Fili). Viktor Ivanovich Levchenko was navigator. Grigory Trofimovich Pobezhimov, flight engineer, was a veteran polar mechanic who had served on G. Krasinsky’s 1927 expedition to Wrangel Island and had flown from 1935 to 1937 with Vasily Molokov. Nikolai Nikolaevich Godovikov, flight engineer, was a factory technician from the DB-A assembly plant. Nikolai Yakovlevich Galkovsky was radio operator.

Departure and the polar leg

Departure was from Shchelkovo military airfield outside Moscow on 12 August 1937, the same airfield Chkalov and Gromov had used. Reported takeoff weight was approximately 34,500 kg. The cargo reportedly included Russian furs and roughly 32 kg of black caviar, intended for symbolic delivery in the United States.

The planned route ran northeast from Moscow over the Soviet Arctic, by way of the Franz Josef Land area, across the polar ice cap to the North Pole, then southwest to Fairbanks, Alaska. Planned distance was roughly 6,650 km and planned flight time roughly thirty hours.

The aircraft climbed slowly under its overload. The Moscow Times, drawing on Library of Congress and Russian sources in 2012, reports that the far-right engine “trailed smoke” almost from takeoff. Routine position reports came in as N-209 crossed the Soviet Arctic through the night and into the next day. The aircraft reported crossing the North Pole on 13 August 1937 at about 13:40 GMT.

The engine failure and the last transmission

After the Pole, the aircraft radioed engine failure and deteriorating weather. The substance of the message is consistent across Soviet and US press of the time and across modern reconstructions. The No. 4 engine, on the far right, had failed because of a problem with the oil system. The aircraft was entering heavy overcast. Icing was beginning. The crew intended to descend, or to attempt a landing.

The Moscow Times records the last full message as: “The far-right engine has quit due to a problem with the oil system. Entering overcast skies. Elevation 4,600 meters. Will attempt a landing.” Radio communications broke off on 13 August 1937 at 17:58 Moscow time, approximately 14:48 GMT, after the Pole. The time of last contact is reported as 17:58 Moscow time in TASS and in Wikipedia; the 1937 USSR clock conventions differed from modern Moscow Standard Time, so the GMT offset of about three hours and ten minutes is approximate.

Several later partial transmissions are recorded in Soviet listening-station logs and were widely discussed in the Soviet press. One was a short numeric code, reported variously as “3400” or “34, 36.” Some Russian researchers read it as a forced-landing intent code; others as a corrupted position report. The dossier reads it as documented partial-signal data, not as a confirmed landing call. After that, no further confirmed transmission was ever received.

The search of 1937 and 1938

The Soviet response was immediate and large. Soviet polar pilots Mikhail Vodopyanov, Vasily Molokov, and Ilya Mazuruk flew search missions from Soviet polar airfields including Tikhaya Bay, Cape Schmidt, and Tiksi. On the western side of the Arctic, the Soviet government, through its ambassador in Washington Konstantin Umansky, contacted the Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, who recruited Sir George Hubert Wilkins (1888 to 1958) to lead the western Arctic search. The Soviet Embassy funded the operation.

Wilkins flew first to Coppermine in the Northwest Territories on 23 August 1937, then operated from Aklavik and Point Barrow, using a Consolidated PBY Catalina (PBY-1) seaplane during the open-water season and a Lockheed Electra 10 on skis through the polar winter and spring of 1938. The published record describes approximately nine major flights, five in 1937 and four in 1938, two of them in the polar night. The grid eventually covered an area the Moscow Times described as the size of Montana, around 380,000 square kilometres.

Other searchers included the Canadian bush pilots Bob Randall and Herbert Hollick-Kenyon, and the American pilot Jimmie Mattern in a Lockheed 12. Alaska Native search parties out of Point Barrow, Wainwright, and other coastal communities were activated, and reports of sightings were collected by Sergeant Stanley Morgan of the US Army Signal Corps at Barrow. The American clergyman Homer Flint Kellems mounted a smaller private search.

Nothing was found. No debris, no oil slick, no radio beacon, no remains.

The 1937 Oliktok sighting and later wreckage reports

Across the decades, several reports of possible N-209 wreckage have surfaced. None has been confirmed.

In the fall of 1937, near Oliktok Point, Alaska, roughly 250 to 300 km east of Point Barrow, Iñupiat hunters reported to Sergeant Morgan that they had watched a large aircraft fly low, “hit the water, pull up, and then crash into the sea near the Jones Islands.” The next day they reported finding an oil slick on the water. The account was rediscovered by the filmmaker Yury Salnikov in 1983, in a 1939 letter from Homer Kellems held in Soviet Foreign Ministry archives, and is reported here as documented investigative testimony.

In March 1999, Dennis Thurston of the US Minerals Management Service in Anchorage identified a sonar image resembling, in his description, “a 60-foot cigar” in shallow water in Camden Bay. A May 2000 return expedition lowered an underwater camera through about six feet of sea ice to the target at 25 ft depth; it turned out to be rock.

In 2011 and 2013, Russian Geographic Society expeditions organized by Salnikov with American and Canadian partners focused on waters near Oliktok Point and the Jones Islands using aerial magnetometers and sonar, and concluded in September 2013 with no confirmed find.

Russian post-1991 research

After the dissolution of the USSR, Russian aviation historians gained access to Soviet Air Force archives, including the radio and flight records of 1937, held in the Russian State Military Archive (RGVA). The major works synthesizing this material are by Yury Salnikov, a Russian Geographic Society member and filmmaker (1935 to 2024), whose 1980s and later documentary and archival work re-opened the case in Russian public discourse and was the basis for the 1999 to 2013 Beaufort Sea expeditions, and by Mikhail Maslov, the Russian aviation historian and former Tupolev structural designer, who has written extensively on Soviet pre-war multi-engine aircraft including the DB-A.

Per Salnikov, the project was rushed under political pressure to meet a schedule, and engineers had only about three months to prepare a fundamentally untested airframe. The specific claim, repeated in some popular accounts, that a defective fuel pump was noticed pre-takeoff and not repaired, is not directly confirmed in the sources gathered here and is not asserted as fact.

The hypotheses

Each is labeled as hypothesis. None is confirmed.

Hypothesis A: catastrophic icing plus engine failure plus structural breakup at altitude. For: the 14:48 GMT message itself records engine failure, heavy overcast, and icing on an overloaded prototype with known marginality at overload. Against: cannot be confirmed without wreckage.

Hypothesis B: controlled forced landing on polar pack ice, then exposure. For: Levanevsky was an experienced Arctic pilot, the aircraft reportedly carried 45 days of supplies, a tent, a portable radio, and a rubber float, and the message explicitly says “Will attempt a landing.” Against: no portable-radio signal was ever received despite a massive listening effort, no debris has ever been found, and surviving on pack ice with six men through the onset of polar winter would have been almost impossible.

Hypothesis C: fuel exhaustion and ditching in open ocean. For: the loss of an engine forced higher fuel burn on the remaining three of an already overloaded aircraft, and the 1937 Iñupiat sighting near Oliktok Point is consistent with a low-altitude ditching attempt. Against: no debris recovered, and the very fast loss of radio is more consistent with a structural event than a slow fuel exhaustion.

Hypothesis D: Stalin-era political pressure and pre-takeoff sabotage. This is reported as documented Russian conspiracy speculation and is not supported by mainstream scholarship. The Chkalov and Gromov flights had succeeded immediately before with high political reward to all involved; there is no clear documentary support; the political logic of sabotaging a propaganda flight at the apex of the program is weak. The hypothesis is recorded here because it exists in the Russian-language literature, not because the file supports it.

Hypothesis E: combination cause. This is the most defensible reading in modern Russian and Anglophone scholarship, consistent with Salnikov’s and McCannon’s reconstructions: a cascade in which the failure of the No. 4 engine was survivable on its own, but the combination of overload, icing on the remaining engines, a falling ceiling, and a deteriorating cabin environment forced the aircraft below safe altitude and into terrain it could not be recovered from.

Hypothesis F: successful landing, gradual death on the ice, remains drifted to an unknown location. For: the “Will attempt a landing” transmission, the supplies aboard, and Soviet press reports of trace signals on subsequent days. Against: no remains, no equipment, no signal ever confirmed, and Arctic ice drift over eighty-eight years would have brought any large piece toward the Fram Strait or the Greenland coast, none reliably identified.

What remains unknown

The cause of the disappearance is unknown. The combination reading (Hypothesis E) is the best-supported, and it is not confirmed. Whether N-209 broke up in flight or made a controlled landing on the polar ice is unknown. The precise final position is unknown; estimates range from the polar ice cap between the Pole and Point Barrow to the Beaufort Sea near the Jones Islands and Camden Bay. Whether any of the speculative wreckage reports across the decades actually relate to N-209 is unknown. Whether the pre-takeoff fuel pump claim that recurs in popular accounts is documented in the RGVA files or apocryphal is unknown.