Discounting Peary’s disputed claim

Discounting Peary’s disputed claim, the first men to set foot at the North Pole were a Soviet party[20] including geophysicists Mikhail

Ostrekin and Pavel Senko, oceanographers Mikhail Somov and Pavel Gordienko,[21] and other scientists and flight crew (24 people in total)[22] of Aleksandr Kuznetsov’s Sever-2 expedition (March–May 1948).[23] It was organized by the Chief Directorate of the

Northern Sea Route.[24] The party flew on three planes (pilots Ivan Cherevichnyy, Vitaly Maslennikov and Ilya Kotov) from Kotelny Island to the North Pole and landed there at 4:44pm (Moscow Time, UTC+04:00) on 23 April 1948.[25] They established a temporary camp and for the next two days conducted scientific observations. On 26 April the expedition flew back to the continent.

Next year, on 9 May 1949[26] two other Soviet scientists (Vitali Volovich and Andrei Medvedev)[27] became the first people to parachute onto the North Pole.[28] They jumped from a Douglas C-47 Skytrain, registered CCCP H-369.[29]