the crew of the Norge would be the first explorers verified to have reached the North Pole, when they floated over it in the Norge in 1926. If the Norge expedition was the first to the North Pole, Amundsen and Oscar Wisting were the first men to have reached both geographical poles, by ground or by air. Disappearance and death Amundsen disappeared on 18 June 1928 while flying on a rescue mission in the Arctic. His team included Norwegian pilot Leif Dietrichson, French pilot René Guilbaud, and three more Frenchmen. They were seeking missing members of Nobile's crew, whose new airship had crashed while returning from the North Pole. Amundsen's French Latham 47 flying boat never returned. Later, a wing-float and bottom gasoline tank from the plane, which had been adapted as a replacement wing-float, were found near the Tromsø coast. It is assumed that the plane crashed in the Barents Sea, and that Amundsen and his crew were killed in the wreck, or died shortly afterward. The search for Amundsen and team was called off in September 1928 by the Norwegian government, and the bodies were never found. In 2004 and in late August 2009, the Royal Norwegian Navy used the unmanned submarine Hugin 1000 to search for the wreckage of Amundsen's plane. The searches focused on a area of the sea floor, and were documented by the German production company ContextTV. They found nothing from the Amundsen flight. Personal life Amundsen was a lifelong bachelor, though he had a long-time relationship with the Norwegian-born Kristine Elisabeth ('Kiss') Bennett, the wife of an Englishman, Charles Peto Bennett. He met her in London in 1907 and they remained close for many years, although Amundsen kept the relationship a secret from everyone outside his intimate circle. Later, he became engaged to Bess Magids, an American divorcée whom he had met in Alaska. Though there is little evidence, it was said that Amundsen had a brief affair with his landlady in Antwerp—until he came home and found her dead of an apparent suicide. His biographer Tor Bomann-Larsen also suggests a romantic relationship between Amundsen and Sigrid Castberg, wife of the lawyer Leif Castberg from Gjøvik, in the years before the South Pole expedition, a relationship Amundsen broke off after that expedition in favour of Kiss Bennett. Author Julian Sancton noted that in his younger years, Amundsen was said to have ignored romantic