Joseph O. Fletcher

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Joseph O. Fletcher (b. 1920) was an American Air Force pilot and polar researcher.

Born in Montana, the family moved to Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl. Fletcher started studying at the University of Oklahoma and then continued his studies in meteorology at the MIT. After graduation, he entered the U.S. Army Air Corps and eventually became the commander of a weather squadron stationed in Alaska in the late 1940s. On March 19, 1952, his team landed with a C-47 aircraft modified to have both wheels and skis on a tabular iceberg and established a weather station there, which remained manned for 22 years before that iceberg broke up. The station was initially known just as "T-3", but soon renamed "Fletcher's Ice Island". On May 3, 1952, pilot William P. Benedict and Fletcher as co-pilot^[1] flew that plane to the North Pole, becoming the first humans to land there and the first humans (together with scientist Albert P. Crary, who flew with them) to set foot on the exact geographical North Pole. (However, some sources credit this achievement instead to a Soviet Union expedition that landed there on 23 April 1948.^[2])

Fletcher left the Air Force in 1963. In later years, he held various management positions in meteorological institutions, including a post as director of the NOAA's Ocean and Atmosphere Research Labs (OAR). He retired in 1993. In 2005, he was awarded the honorary membership of the American Meteorological Society.

[edit] Footnotes

^ The original article in the Polar Times stated that Fletcher was the pilot, but in the Fall/Winter 1997 issue of the Polar Times, following a personal communication from Mr. Fletcher, a correction appeared stating that Benedict had been in charge of that flight. This is also confirmed by the interview Brian Shoemaker conducted with Fletcher in 1997 (link below).
^ Concise chronology of approach to the poles, Scott Polar Research Institute