FLIGHT LOG HINTS BYRD FELL SHORT OF POLAR GOAL.

Byline: John Noble Wilford The New York Times

Seventy years ago, on May 9, 1926, in a decade notable for pioneering aviation exploits, Richard E. Byrd and his pilot-mechanic, Floyd Bennett, won fame as the first to fly an airplane to the North Pole. Or so they claimed. Doubts that they reached the pole have persisted to this day, and a few skeptics have suspected that they never even made a serious attempt.

Now archivists at Ohio State University have found the diary Byrd kept on the flight. After a meticulous examination of the diary's contents, including some erasures at critical points, a specialist in navigation and science history has concluded that Lieutenant Commander Byrd (later Rear Admiral Byrd) almost certainly fell short of his polar destination and must have known at the time that he had not succeeded. Other scholars have yet to examine the material.

If Byrd did not succeed, historians of polar exploration said, the team on the dirigible Norge - Roald Amundsen, the Norwegian polar explorer, the American Lincoln Ellsworth and the Italian Umberto Nobile - should be recognized as the first to fly over the North Pole. Their flight, which included many more precise navigational fixes, occurred three days later than Byrd's, and its success in reaching the pole has never been questioned.

At the time, Byrd was hailed as a national hero, paraded up Broadway and welcomed with medals by President Calvin Coolidge. The New York Times, under a front-page banner headline, reported from Spitsbergen, Norway, that ``America's claim to the North Pole was cinched tonight.''

With his reputation as a daring explorer established, Byrd went on to become the first person to fly over the South Pole and lead several expeditions to Antarctica, for which The New York Times had exclusive story rights.

Dennis Rawlins, an independent scholar in Baltimore who specializes in navigation studies and analyzing the records of polar explorers, had previously been instrumental in discounting Robert Peary's claim that he was the first to reach the North Pole by the surface. He examined the Byrd diary's notes and calculations and said they appeared to exonerate Byrd in the case of an especially damning accusation, circulated by a former colleague in 1971, that the explorer had not made a genuine attempt.

The accuser, Bernt Balchen, maintained that Byrd and Bennett had merely disappeared over the horizon, flown around for a certain time and returned to their base at Spitsbergen, Norway, with the claim that they had reached the North Pole.

``This prominent charge now appears most likely to be false,'' Rawlins said.

As it was, Rawlins said in an interview, Byrd's airplane, a tri-motor Fokker monoplane named Josephine Ford, probably came within two and one-fourth degrees of the pole before the two men, concerned about an engine leak, decided to turn back. That would have put the airplane some 150 miles short of the pole, close enough that the aviators could almost see all the way to the top of the world.

``Had the motor's leak not occurred, Byrd and Bennett would have continued their adventure - and would have succeeded in hitting the pole with high accuracy and finding their position there,'' Rawlins said.

Rawlins, who publishes DIO, a journal on navigation and astronomy, was commissioned by Ohio State to analyze the diary entries. Dr. Raimund E. Goerler, the university's archivist, found the diary among a collection of the explorer's papers housed at the Byrd Polar Research Center at the campus in Columbus.

The diary had been overlooked, Goerler said, because its cover bore the date 1925, so no scholars had previously thought of examining it for information of Byrd's later activities.