<P> The first claimed flight over the Pole was made on 9 May 1926 by US naval officer Richard E. Byrd and pilot Floyd Bennett in a Fokker tri-motor aircraft . Although verified at the time by a committee of the National Geographic Society, this claim has since been undermined by the 1996 revelation that Byrd's long - hidden diary's solar sextant data (which the NGS never checked) consistently contradict his June 1926 report's parallel data by over 100 mi (160 km). The secret report's alleged en - route solar sextant data were inadvertently so impossibly overprecise that he excised all these alleged raw solar observations out of the version of the report finally sent to geographical societies five months later (while the original version was hidden for 70 years), a realization first published in 2000 by the University of Cambridge after scrupulous refereeing . </P> <P> According to Standish, "Anyone who is acquainted with the facts and has any amount of logical reasoning cannot avoid the conclusion that neither Cook, nor Peary, nor Byrd reached the North Pole; and they all knew it ." </P> <P> The first consistent, verified, and scientifically convincing attainment of the Pole was on 12 May 1926, by Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and his US sponsor Lincoln Ellsworth from the airship Norge . Norge, though Norwegian - owned, was designed and piloted by the Italian Umberto Nobile . The flight started from Svalbard in Norway, and crossed the Arctic Ocean to Alaska . Nobile, with several scientists and crew from the Norge, overflew the Pole a second time on 24 May 1928, in the airship Italia . The Italia crashed on its return from the Pole, with the loss of half the crew . </P> <P> In May 1937 the world's first North Pole ice station, North Pole - 1, was established by Soviet scientists by air 20 kilometres (13 mi) from the North Pole . The expedition members: oceanographer Pyotr Shirshov, meteorologist Yevgeny Fyodorov, radio operator Ernst Krenkel, and the leader Ivan Papanin conducted scientific research at the station for the next nine months . By 19 February 1938, when the group was picked up by the ice breakers Taimyr and Murman, their station had drifted 2850 km to the eastern coast of Greenland . </P>

Who was first man to reach north pole