Thor Solberg

Thor Solberg (1893 to 1967) was a Norwegian-born aviation pioneer who made the first successful flight from the United States to Norway, in 1935. He was born on his family farm at Florø in Sogn og Fjordane, took his pilot licence in 1919 after training in Germany, and settled in the United States in the 1920s, where he ran an art studio and picture framing shop in Brooklyn while he planned his flight. A first attempt in 1932 with Carl Petersen in a Bellanca K ended in a crash landing near Newfoundland. In July 1935 he set out from Floyd Bennett Field in a Loening C-2-C Air Yacht named Liev Eiriksson with a radio operator, and reached Norway on 16 August 1935 by way of Labrador, Greenland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands and Bergen. In 1939 he founded the Solberg-Hunterdon Airport in New Jersey, which trained about 5,000 aviators in the Second World War. The aircraft is on show at the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology in Oslo. This entry rests on his English Wikipedia article alone and a second source pass is owed.