Richard E. Byrd on March 5, 1927. The President of the United States of America takes pleasure in presenting the Navy Cross to Rear Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd Jr. (NSN: 0–7918), United States Navy, for extraordinary heroism in the line of his profession as Commanding Officer of the Byrd Antarctic Expedition I, in that on November 28, 1929 he took off in his "Floyd Bennett" from the Expedition's base at Little America, Antarctica and, after a flight made under the most difficult conditions he reached the South Pole on November 29, 1929. After flying some distance beyond this point he returned to his
Richard E. Byrd site. NRAS Squantum was commissioned on August 15, 1923, and is considered to have been the first air base in the Naval Reserve program. Byrd commanded the aviation unit of the arctic expedition to North Greenland led by Donald B. MacMillan from June to October 1925. On May 9, 1926, Byrd and Navy Chief Aviation Pilot Floyd Bennett attempted a flight over the North Pole in a Fokker F.VIIa/3m Tri-motor monoplane named "Josephine Ford", after the daughter of Ford Motor Company president Edsel Ford, who helped finance the expedition. The flight went from Spitsbergen (Svalbard) and back to its take-off