Dr. LeBel, who serves as Chief Pilot for New England Airlines, drew upon a lifetime of aviation experience to explain how and why Byrd's claim to have made the first manned flight to the North Pole on May 9, 1926 was a fabrication. (His analysis can be found in his paper The Smoking Gun, A Club Fellow Analyzes Byrd's North Pole Flight).
Dr. LeBel became interested in this subject when he realized a boyhood dream of flying north of the Arctic Circle as part of a "Cold War" military project in the early 1960s. Later he examined a copy of To the Pole: the Diary and Notebook of Richard E. Byrd 1925-1927, which, along with research and exhaustive analysis, convinced him that Byrd and his co-pilot Floyd Bennett, could not have not made the flight that they claim to have made. When legendary flyer Bernt Balchen's widow gave him a copy of the flight record of the Josephine Ford, Byrd's plane, Dr. LeBel knew that he had in his possession the so-called smoking gun.