Sir Hubert Wilkins - Australian Pioneer Polar Explorer, Cinematographer, Aviator, and Humanitarian Environmentalist (Oct 99

	LOCATION: Eielson Museum Hatton, North Dakota
Director of Photography Peter Falk and producer John Hipwell at the Eielson home in North Dakota. Wilkins' Fokker is kept in the trailer at the right.
The small town of Hatton, North Dakota might seem like an odd place to go searching for a forgotten Australian polar explorer, but it's here that one of the most significant artefacts of Sir Hubert Wilkins' is kept. When he was exploring the area between Alaska and the North Pole in 1926 and 1927 Wilkins bought and flew two Fokker planes, he named them "Alaskan" and "Detroiter." In 1928, having crashed and repaired both planes twice, Wilkins decided he needed a smaller, lighter plane, specifically a Lockheed Vega. To raise the funds to purchase the Vega he sold the Detroiter to Charles Kingsford Smith, who renamed it "Southern Cross" and flew it across the Pacific the same year. Today it sits in its own museum at Brisbane Airport, Australia. The Lockheed Vega proved its worth and in 1928 Wilkins and Ben Eielson became the first people to fly a plane across the Arctic Sea. The following year Ben Eielson was killed in a plane crash in Siberia. As an act of respect for his great pilot friend, Wilkins gave Eielson's family the Alaskan. The family have looked after it ever since and today the "sister" of the Southern Cross is disassembled and kept in a trailer behind the Eielson family home in Hatton, North Dakota.