As reported a few days ago, the newsreel archive company British Pathé uploaded its entire collection of 85,000 films, in high resolution, to YouTube last week. Dated from 1896 to 1976, the collection included several films set in Alaska primarily from the middle of the 20th century, including several on topics of aviation.
In "Aloft Over Alaska" the narrator announces the pending construction of a new highway from Canada through Alaska as pilots depart from British Columbia in an amphibious aircraft. Future plans, he intones, include a highway to "the Bering Straits" and "a tunnel 40 miles under the sea joining North America to Asia".
British Pathé newsreels were once a dominant part of the movie theater experience in Great Britain and include countless subjects shot all over the world. The Alaska films in the release contain footage of "U.S. jets patrol Alaska (1951)," a 1955 look at the Sign Post Forest in Watson Lake, and a record of the 1953 Mount Spurr eruption.
In order to find Alaskan films, viewers should search by not only the name of the state but also specific features, like "Mt. McKinley". That's how I found an outstanding two-and-a-half minute film from 1936 of a Pacific Alaska Airways flight out of Fairbanks that recorded the first complete set of photographs of Mt. McKinley's peaks.
PAA was a subsidiary of Pan American World Airways that operated throughout Alaska. It was founded in 1932 and became completely absorbed in Pan American in 1941. This footage is from the National Geographic Society-Pan American Airways Mt. McKinley Flight Expedition during which famed mountaineer Bradford Washburn used a special aerial camera to take the first large-format photographs of the mountain. The Lockheed Electra was flown by S.E. Robbins, who was one of the first pilots to land on McKinley in 1932. Washburn later wrote about the expedition in 1938.
The British Pathé film is the best way to appreciate what Robbins, Washburn and the rest of the expedition accomplished. Flying with the door removed with temperatures inside the aircraft of 14 below, the photographs (and film) showed the world the most complete picture of Mt. McKinley ever captured at the time. As the film makes clear, it was the vantage point of an aircraft that made those pictures possible, and the steady hand of a pilot like Robbins was critical. Now in newsreel footage, Alaska aviation was on its way to becoming famous around the world.
Contact Colleen Mondor at colleen(at)alaskadispatch.com.