le landing place, three men, one of them Capt. Lionel M. Woolson,
aeronautical engineer for the Packard Motor Company and adapter of the
diesel engine to airplanes, were killed here today."

[Illustration: Figure 37.--Interior of Bellanca, showing Parker D.
Cramer, pilot (left), and Oliver L. Paquette, radio operator, just
before taking off from Detroit, Michigan, on July 28, 1931. (Smithsonian
photo A202.)]

The second of these accidents is described in the September 1931 issue
of _U.S. Air Services_:

Columbus wanted to sail west beyond the limits set by the learned
navigators of his time, and in much the same consuming fashion
Parker D. Cramer wanted to show his generation and posterity that
a subarctic air route to Europe via Canada, Greenland, Iceland,
Norway, and Denmark was feasible.... On July 27, without any
preliminary announcement, Cramer left Detroit in a Diesel-engined
Bellanca, and following the course he took with Bert Hassel three
years ago, he flew first to Cochrane, on Hudson Bay. His next stop
was Great Whales and then Wakeham Bay. From there he flew to
Pangnirtum, Baffin Land, and across the Hudson Straits to
Holsteinborg, Greenland. He crossed the icecap at a point farther
north than the routes that have been discussed heretofore, but
almost on the most direct or Great Circle route from Detroit to
Copenhagen. He was accompanied by Oliver Paquette, radio operator.
They were on their way more than a week before they were
discovered. To Iceland, to the Faroe Islands, to the Shetlands.

They were taxiing across the little harbor of Lerwick, Shetland
Islands, when a messenger from the bank waved a yellow paper. It
was a warning of gales on the coast east to Copenhagen. Cramer
apparently thought it was an enthusiastic bon voyage, and, after
circling the town, flew away. A Swedish radio station reported a
faint "Hello, Hello, Hello" in English, but the plane was not seen
again.

As the result of a personal conversation with his brother, William A.
Cramer, in 1964, the author learned that the fuselage and floats of the
airplane were found six weeks later. Since there was no indication of a
heavy impact (not a single glass dial on the instrument panel was
broken), a successful landing must have been made. Several weeks later,
a package was found wrapped in a torn oilskin containing inst